I am an intern at a small (<40 employees) web apps development consulting
company. One of the interns is in the formative stages of becoming that
guy who insists dismanteling his power supply worked to fix the screen
resolution at home. He's also picked up this SensitiveNewAgeGuy habit of
being openly introspective about his development with his coworkers.
Once every few weeks he anounces some major breakthrough in How He Should
Live His Life. (Such as:
"I should make sure I'll have enough money to pay
my rent before I get an advance at work to buy bongos."
or
"Buying groceries is way cheaper than eating takeout every meal."
and
"I will never pay off my $5000 credit card debit if I only make the
minimum payment.")
In any case, yesterday he announced that he had learned Three Things from
working here.
1) Never admit you don't know something. (If you do, the people who know
it will get the new exciting assignment, and you'll be stuck doing the
same old crap you've been doing all year.)
2) Never admit when you've made a mistake. (It makes people think you are
unreliable, dumb, or both, and then you surely won't get the new
interesting assignments.)
3) Never give your problems to other people to solve. (Once they see
you've been going about the problem all wrong for days, they will think
you are dumb and not give you good assignments.)
[The third point is interesting because most of our interns are part time,
and most of our assignments have 1-2 day deadlines. If a part time intern
doesn't finish his assignment while he's here, he *has* to give it to
someone who will be in the next day, or we won't make the deadline.]
This kid is such a trip... The one guy who I work with all the time is a
perfectly cool guy, and a great programmer. He's got no problem asking me
to look at his code when he gets stuck, and I ask the same of him. But
this other crazy kid refuses to ask for help. He'll spend all day
stuck on a problem, then bitch the next day that once he noticed
such-and-such it
was easy, but someone hid it in the code. (90% of the time, the code is
marked correctly with the writer, and the writer is sitting in the same
room as him.)
It really is an interesting look at where these ideas form... Disturbing,
but interesting. Thankfully our management and senior programming
staff is good enough to know that good programmers ask for help and don't
pretend to know everything. The senior coder I work with asks interviewees
questions like "I see you've got alot of experience with <some language>.
How would you do <a project totally unsuited to that language> in <that
language>?" to see if they'll answer "I wouldn't to it in that language"
or if they will give a long convoluted explanation of how you could do it.
He'll also ask (for example) Java programmers about stuff that is totally
not on their resume (FoxPro, for example) to see if they'll try to
bullshit him. Definately the kind of guy I get along with.
--Alison
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