So, calculating π is a fun pastime for people it seems. There are many ways to do it, but this one is mine. It’s 12 lines of code, it wastes a lot of electricity and it takes forever to converge.
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public double EstimatePi(int numberOfTrials) { var r = new Random(); return 4 * Enumerable.Range(1, numberOfTrials) .Select(o => { var x = r.
So me and my wife had a babby recently. Unfortunately my wife had some preterm labor around week 33 and we had to spend about 10 days in the hospital. Don’t worry, everything turned out all right (see perfection below), but I was pretty burnt out after the 10 days in the hospital. My wife was happy with my performance during our mini-crisis and she told me to go indulge a little.
So I read this article today about how the tech industry is too elitist and thinks everyone who’s good is already rich and can follow their bliss until the cows come home waiting for the olympian software companies of the world to come hire them. I just wanted to provide a data point from Stack Exchange. I’m not gonna bloviate that we’re all rock stars at Stack Exchange (I wouldn’t even describe myself like that) but here’s the list of schools attended by all the programmers and sysadmins at Stack Exchange:
Before I faded a crazy counter offer and got my dream job I worked in finance. I was going on interviews in 2009 having been laid off from my second job after the 2008 collapse. This was back in the days when I was still using contingency recruiters to find jobs. They’re a natural fit for finding finance jobs because banks and hedge funds have money they’re willing to spend on recruiters when they aren’t swimming in it (artists rendering on the right), or spinning it into thread for their golden parachute side business.
Last I left you, dear readers, I had just been given an offer to work my dream job at Stack Exchange by Joel. I accepted the offer on the spot, and went home walking on air. What do you do when you get the offer for your dream job? You go home, crack open a bottle of wine and write your resignation letter.
Achieving a dream is really liberating. I’d written a resignation letter before, but it wasn’t like this.
Matt recently wrote his story about how he got his job at Stack Exchange and I thought it was such a good idea that I’d go ahead and write my own. This is my long rambling account of my path to my dream job.
Getting bit by the bug I was a physics major. I spent the summers of my college years at the 88" Cyclotron at UC Berkeley helping in the preparation, execution and analysis of medium energy nuclear physics experiments.
In my previous post I outlined one reason why I think employee referral bonuses aren’t good: They distort the incentives for referring someone into the company in a way that can’t possibly be good. First off, my thanks go out to everyone who read that post. Some people refuted my argument in various ways and I thought I’d take a look at a couple of them.
Refutation The First: Bonus Size Matters This is correct.
