O/T : Looking for an entry level LAMP developer for contract work.

[David Schwartz]

Here’s something:

A while back I had a contract in a support Dept at a Big Corp in town. When I started, I was told, “Don’t do anything except hold their hands.”

One Friday morning about two weeks into the contract, I arrived at work and everybody in my Dept was gone except me. I wasn’t alerted ahead of time.

Around 11:45 AM, three people appeared at my cube door: the FInance Mgr (head of Dept), Payroll Mgr, and someone else.

The FM said, “I guess you’re the only Support person here today.” I said, “Looks that way.”

He said, “Look, we’ve got a problem here and I need you to get it fixed. TODAY. If you don’t your contract is caput. We need someone who can fix this crap NOW.”

As far as SteveT’s question goes … THIS IS PURE PROBLEM-SOLVING ABILITY. I had no exposure or knowledge to their system at all. I’d been there for 2 weeks and didn’t have a clue about their software, hardware, network, or anything.


I’m like, “Well, ok. What’s the problem?”

They proceeded to explain it to me … which I’ll summarize here only because some of you will get a chuckle out of it.

Payroll starts running their check run at 11:30 AM.  After about 10 minutes, it hangs-up. They have to abort the run, void the checks, and start over. It usually keeps happening. They run it specifically over lunch because most of the Financial Dept is at lunch, so nobody’s online.

I poked around and noticed there were a couple of people running reports, including the gal in the cube next to me. (They ran these reports that went to Epsons dot-matrix printers and they’d run for about 45 minutes.)

BTW, this is some kind of accounting system running on a bunch of old DOS machines (circa 1995) hooked into a Banyan Vines LAN, sharing access to files on a file server.

I looked at how the gal in the next cube ran her reports. It was a batch file that looked like this:

runrptapp.exe xyz abc >lpt

(I forget what devices were on DOS, but … notice the right-arrow.)

Digging around, I discovered that this app, which I’m calling runrptapp.exe, opens the database file on the server, which happens to be the same database file the Payroll app used. It was a very popular database back then (i forget the name, but it’s not dBase). I happened to know that that particular database used FILE-LEVEL locking. 

Notice the right-arrow … 

Question: who starts off their reports first: the gal in the next cube, or Payroll?

Answer: gal in the next cube! At 11 AM, because she needs it for a 2PM meeting, and it usually crashes over lunch and needs to be restarted.

Did you notice the right-arrow ...

What happens is she runs her report and the printer is fed data in real-time as the report extracts records from the DB. After a while, it has extracted as much as it can before the print buffer gets filled up, and it starts to crawl along.

Some time after she starts runnign her report (15-20 mins), the Payroll Dept starts their check run. 

It access the same DB.

Notice that right-arrow … and think, “file-level locking” … and “Payroll wants to run against this DB at the same time …

hmmm …. changed the BAT file to this:

runrptapp.exe xyz abc >temprpt.txt
copy temprpt.txt lpt1

The report took about 15 seconds to run, then it started printing it from the local copy on the disk.

VIOLA! PROBLEM SOLVED.   sort of …

Monday morning I had another manager wating at my door when I arrived. “Weren’t you told not to fix anything for these people? JUST HOLD THEIR HANDS, right?”

"Well, the Finance Mgr said if I didn’t do SOMETHING he’d fire me.”

<grrr>

The vendor had sent out their top support people, and even sent their DEVELOPERS, and NOBODY had been able to fix this problem. They even had some support guys from Banyan come out, and they couldn’t fix it either. 

Turns out, the Finance Dept didn’t like this piece of software and it came with a 90-day money-back guarantee. They wanted their money back.

Nobody else who’d tried to fix this problem, including the SMEs, couldn’t solve it.

But silly me … it took me about 15 minutes to fix it. With no subject-matter expertise at all.

And a week later, my contract was terminated. :o


So it doesn’t surprize me when people report they have trouble finding folks with good problem solving skills. 

Unfortunately, the kinds of questions I get in interviews don’t go into this at all. They’re mostly general stuff, trick questions, and things intended to get a feeling of how good you are with existing tools.

This is the problem. If people have good problem-solving skills, they CAN figure this shit out, no matter what.

But if you don’t know the tools, and regardless of you problem-solving skills, BZZZTTT! You’re DISQUALIFIED!

I’ve also worked at several places where we encountered LAN problems, and after a couple of days with their “A+ Certified,” “Novell Certified," and “Microsoft Certified” experts being unable to solve server/workstation issues that were holding me up, I asked if I could “take a look”. In every instance, I’ve been able to solve their problems in about 15 minutes, knowing nothing about their specific network, but just from my general understanding of networking, LANs, and that stuff.

Yet I could not get a job in an IT Dept if my life depended on it — I’m not “certified” and obviously “lack the expertise”.

This stuff drives me nuts, becuase nobody interviews in a way that uncovers problem-solving abilities at all. 

It’s nearly 100% focused on identifying subject-matter expertise the candidate may (or may not) have in very narrow technical areas.

This seems totally naive, but I’d think a company would want to have a few people on staff who are excellent problem-solvers, and just loan them out to projects and departments that get stuck on various issues. Because problem-solving skills are NOT technology-specific. (In fact, they seem to be relatively hard to find.)

-David Schwartz



> On Jul 28, 2015, at 9:32 PM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 20:30:31 -0700
> Sesso <sesso at djsesso.com> wrote:
> 
>> "Companies should focus a little less on buzzwords, and a lot more
>> on someone's ability/desire to learn, ability to think critically,
>> and ablility to solve problems.”
>> 
>> 
>> I have a hard time finding candidates with all 3 of the above. I have
>> met many that have a strong desire to learn but lack problem solving
>> skills. Now for a shared hosting company, this is fine.
>> Dedicated/Cloud infra. won’t work out.
>> 
>> jason
> 
> What are both of you meaning by "problem solving skills?" What,
> exactly, would the work of someone with "problem solving skills" look
> like?
> 
> How does "problem solving skills" differ from "thinking critically?"
> 
> I'm not asking out of idle curiosity, this is actually part of what I
> do.
> 
> 
> SteveT
>