Wouldn't it be great to exist entirely for yourself? The objective of life would be to achieve zero pain and suffering and as much "pleasure" as possible at any cost since we are not considering the effect of our existence on other human beings.

Just think of a life with absolutely no consequences, because you just don't care. You take whatever you need or want. You eat, drink and consume anything you desire. You will not be short of heat and shelter, because you will just take it at will.

Why?

Suppose you had decided to arbitrarily limit your life to the time that the consequences got to you.

I am not asking this question because I am considering this course of action ... no, I don't have the courage.... :-) I intend to live as long as possible in as curmudgeonly a way as possible... and I want to live long enough to see a fellow human being walk on Mars.

This is an attempt to solicit some input to answer an important moral question.

I've been offered a new job, and it's a good one. It will be much harder technically, but much more interesting and I'll be developing my skills accordingly in a growing company on high-tech products. Better still, it's mostly all Linux and other embedded OSs, very little Windows at all and probably no C++!

Our poor Indian at work thought I was going to work for a different customer on a different project. When I explained that I was leaving the company, he was very surprised.

I later found out that he and his Indian colleagues have a very different perspective on what's going on, especially regarding the future of the acquired staff and the reasons for the deal. No one has told them that they are involved because they are cheaper to employ than us, and that our future is very uncertain as our existing work is offshored.

A small handful of staff have started to work on projects for new customers, but that has meant travelling long distances to customers' sites and being away from home for long periods. No one asked for this, but they're doing it because they have nowhere else to go yet.

And go they will as soon as the opportunities arise.

In the olden days, your Linux (or whatever) distribution used to come with several desktop environments and plain window managers to choose from.

From what I can see from reading the comments in the peanut gallery these days it seems that a distribution comes welded to a particular desktop environment and that one changes distribution in order to use a different desktop environment...

*Sigh*

This is not How it was Meant to Be.

Our Indian has been with us now for nearly 3 weeks. He's a very friendly guy but he's very shy and nervous. He also looked very sheepish and embarrassed when I introduced him to other people not in the team as the guy who was learning our project to ramp up the off-shore team that would be taking over from us.

The outsourcing company that now owns us has completely under-estimated the time required to assimilate our knowledge and I know for a fact through the grape vine that our project is going offshore very soon i.e. at the end of the 3 months that our motivated, empowered and passionate colleague will be with us to learn.

He now knows how to compile our code, but he has no idea what all the builds are for (same questions asked every day despite it being explained and documented). He hasn't really cottoned on to the idea of using bookmarks or favourites in the web browser to remember useful web pages. Every time I tell him to go to such-and-such a page, he goes to his email an looks for the particular email with that link in it...

Progress is slow, tea-breaks are long and clandestine meetings with offshore managers on the phone are frequent and long. He doesn't feel like part of the team.

The poor soul is drowning in our (not very good) internal documentation.

Some of our PHBs told me that for this outsourcing deal to be financially successful, at least 50% of us have to be off our current customer's (i.e. former employer's) projects. So half of us have to be replaced by Indians in the next few months.

Never mind: there are Exciting New Possibilities of Interesting New Work(TM) for "other clients." That could involve travel and staying away from home for weeks or months at a time, and the new employer is notoriously stingy about travel and accommodation allowances.

But, hey, the staff do it because they are so enthusiastic about what they are getting to work on and the company is so great!

Our Indian has a son who is not quite 4 months old yet, and he will be here for 3 months, away from his family. The stingy slave-driving so-and-sos will not pay for him to go back to India to see his wife and child during that time.

What a lovely bunch.

I didn't get the job (interview number 5).

They said some very nice things about me, but the particular skills they were looking for (i.e. Perl) in addition to C and Linux were too rusty. They said that there was no doubt that I'd be able to pick it up again, but that they needed a real expert who could start on the project straight away without any time to ramp up.

There are a few other things I need to revise as well.

The thing is, I don't want to spend much time on Perl since it's not a skill that's in great demand these days. This job was a bit of a niche.

Today I went for my 5th interview since starting to look for a new opportunity back in May.

This one was very different to the previous four (they've all been quite difference to each other). It was a very small company with great products that's growing. I also have some very relevant skills.

My first impression was that they are very nice people, very intelligent as well and optimistic without being silly (no pointy-haired buzz-words).

There was a technical test but the guy asking the questions hadn't seen my CV. I'm afraid I didn't answer many of the questions. There were several about the finer points of Perl. It's a very long time since I did any serious Perl.

I'm not sure if my technical skills are quite strong enough for them.

I was quite impressed by the way they questioned me and kept things focused. They obviously knew how to get the right sort of information out of a candidate without being intimidating and yet still being direct.

They gave me a little tour of their lab where there were plenty of scopes and pretty flashing lights to see.

Our Indian is starting with us next week for 3 months. The existing team members have between them 25 years experience of our project, but the motivated and empowered colleague from the sub-continent is going to learn it all in 3 months, return to India and start up a team to take over the work.

There are rumours that any exciting new work procured for us will be swiftly offshored to the cheap people. Who'd have guessed it? So what does that leave us to do?

I'm down to 1 day's worth of spare annual leave now, and I'm spending half of that on an interview soon. It sounds very interesting, and a big challenge. Who knows, it might even involve growing some pointy hair.

Needs must and all that.

Tonight, there was more proof that Planet Rock is the coolest radio station in the world, even slightly cooler than BBC Radio 4: they played the theme tune to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy!

I had, up until now, no idea that it was by the Eagles and called Journey of the Sorcerer.

What a great way to end the weekend :-)

C, C++ and C# are all the same if you're a recruitment consultant, it would seem.

Auto Test has gone to India. There have been Indians learning about Auto Test for a few (3?) months and work being started off-shore in parallel. At the daily scrum one morning last week our Auto Test folks were told that they weren't doing auto test any more and not to do any when they got back to their desks. They were to be reassigned to other existing projects.

Within a day or so they were not working on anything different, but were responding to a barrage of "how to" questions from the Indian staff who had taken over...

My project is allegedly getting an Indian soon. He will be with us for 3 months. It usually takes a new person about a year to become productive on our project, let alone an expert. But, hey, these guys are empowered and motivated.

I still haven't found a new job yet. I did have another telephone interview on Friday for a job in London with a company that does security software - allegedly cross-platform software - who were looking for a Linux developer.

I heard today that they don't want to proceed to a face-to-face interview. That's fair enough.

First of all, the interviewer got the time wrong by 15 minutes and he was a bit exasperated when I eventually answered the phone but I explained that I had a printed copy of the email with the correct time and date on it.

On with the questions, so I went backwards through my CV. The poor soul couldn't fathom how I'd got from nuclear physics to software engineering without any training. I explained that I'd been writing code all my life and had largely taught myself etc. This didn't seem to impress him, but I explained about some of the highly-technical OS internals courses etc. that employers had sent me on.

Then came all the Windows questions. I thought this was a Linux and pre-boot environment job and I explained that I knew about real mode and the memory lay out and that when I was 16 I'd worked on a DOS TSR in 8086 assembly language, looked at LILO code and put a protected mode boot loader on a system I used to work on. Not very impressed.

It actually turns out that most of their stuff is for Windows: i.e. disk encryption and protection against malware. As he said, Linux already has disk encryption (which we all know anyway). The "cross-platform" claims come from the fact that they have a product that sits on a network (and runs on Windows) that clients of all kinds can access in some fashion, presumably for authentication and virus checking (but he didn't explain further).

To add insult to injury, this was a fairly senior position and the top of the salary range on offer was £5k lower than most other company's low end offers for that sort of work in London.

I've been trapped in Application land for a long time now. A few years back I got to to everything from the boot loader, initialisation scripts, device driver modification, demons up to the web UI and packaging of binaries.

My value proposition is that I have all of that experience plus in recent years I've been doing Scrum, Agile and TDD. And I'm pretety darned good at C and bash.

And patience, competence, attention span, rationality...

However, when getting dressed the other day, little Turgid announced that he'd like to have "blue legs."

We put on his jeans.

Soon, Zigziglar from the 5th Dimension will materialise on planet Earth to grace us with his Cosmic Presence, imparting a message of goodwill and hope, sparking a spiritual awakening and to engender transdimensional harmony amongst all sentient beings of the universe: be excellent to each other!

The BBC reports that two people have been taken to hospital following the "world's hottest chilli" competition at an Edinburgh Indian restaurant.

Yummy!

Interview number 4 yesterday was my worst ever, and I wasted half a day of annual leave humiliating myself in front of some very learned and accomplished people.

I'm mainly a C guy, but I do a bit of C++ at work. I taught myself from books and frobbed with it a little at home but I don't use it on any of my own fun projects because it isn't fun and it's a dead end. My semi-current employer sent me on an embedded real-time C++ course a few years back which was very good. It really explained the lunacy of the language in great detail. The instructor even advised us to avoid iostream (i.e. cout and such nonsense) and used the good old-fashioned C stdio functions :-)

So yesterday I ill-advisedly went to an interview for a very senior C++ position. Originally I'd applied for an intermediate one, but that one got filled by an internal transfer. They liked me from the telephone interview (I knew what a page table was and about exception handlers) so they invited me to this one.

I'm afraid I didn't do very well. I was presented with a technical test first in a room with a glass wall. They knew I'm a Linux guy but they gave me a Windows PC with Visual Studio and a new project with a main() function (with a funny Windows name) ready to go. I had 45 minutes.

The test looked very easy. It was about some fairly elementary data structures, and hubris got the better of me. Instead of going for a simple, hard-coded solution I went to town thinking I'd get it done in the 45 minutes. Whoops.

There were two people. The one I'd spoken to before made little attempt to hide his disappointment at what I'd done. I'd tried my best to do things the "right way" for C++ but I'd forgotten the special baroque and silly syntax for initialising member variables in a class, so I put the initialisation in the constructor. I made sure I brought that up before they did.

We had a good chat about things, about the merits and downsides of various solutions, why exceptions are bad in an embedded system etc. etc.

They let me out to go to the toilet.

When I came back, another one had joined in and they were talking about me in the glass-walled room. They came out and left me to sit there.

Five minutes later, the first one came back, eyes looking down at the floor to tell me that they'd decided there was "no point in doing the second part of the interview because, well, you failed the technical part."

Computer people are not known for their tact and diplomacy.

He did say that they needed someone who was up to a particular standard who could start straight away, that they couldn't take someone on and wait 6 months for them to learn. He said that I should practice these things at home, which was nice of him. He didn't say "you're completely useless." Although he was clearly thinking it.

But he might as well.

I knew the job was way above me. The lower end of the salary range was 30% above what I'm on just now.

I'm not sure how interesting I'd have found the work anyway.... and C++ .. Ugh!

So I'm going to take his advice and write a bunch of noddy C++ programs to demonstrate various algorithms, data structures and techniques, including different ways of implementing things.

Although C++ isn't great and there are better languages about now, it's pretty pervasive in this industry and will be with us for decades to come, like FORTRAN and COBOL. It would be very silly to avoid learning it for ideological or emotional reasons. (I've learned it mostly on my own in my own time.) The thing is, I haven't used it enough in my day job to be good enough to impress at an interview. And everyone, every company, has different opinions on how C++ should be used...

I want to learn D and Scala, but I'll have to concentrate on C++ just now because that is what pays the bills these days.

We are about to be got by the cloud. They want to throw away all of our working servers and put everything on "the cloud."

"The cloud" will be on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean at the end of a 2Mbit/s link (with lots of latency). Several hundred people will have to get their work (developing software) done this way.