Some questions

Written on 9 April 2015, 07:48pm

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The 3 questions interviewers ask

Can you do the job?
Will you do the job?
Can you work with the others?

Apparently all the interview questions gravitate around these 3 questions.

The five WHYs

Two stories about how many times you must ask ‘why’ before you find the root cause of a problem:

Q: “Why did you submit a purchase requisition for $750?”
A: “Because we need to purchase 150 staplers!”
Q: “Why do you need to purchase 150 staplers?”
A: “Because our agents need to staple the pages of the driver’s license application together.”
Q: “Why do they need to staple those pages together?”
A: Because […]

In the late 1980s, the parks service in the United States were concerned about the deterioration of the stonework on the Lincoln Memorial. So they asked the maintenance staff why the stone was decaying.

The crew needed to spray to get rid of the large volume of bird droppings. So they erected bird nets. These scarcely worked, and were unpopular with tourists, so the parks service called in the maintenance workers again and asked, ‘Why are there so many birds?’

‘The birds come to feed on the spiders,’ they said. ‘And the spiders are there to eat the midges.’ After dark, midges covered the memorial. The spiders came to eat the midges, and the birds came to eat the spiders. So the executives tried insecticides. But this also proved ineffective: the bugs came back. So the committee finally asked one more question. Why are there so many midges in the first place?
It is a wonderful story, and has entered folklore in a philosophy called ‘the five whys’. The idea is that you should always go on asking ‘why’ in order to get to the root cause of a problem rather than the proximate cause. If you do this, what at first appears to be a masonry problem may turn out to be a problem about lighting design and insect behaviour.
Why plane crashes are getting weirder


Random things #3

Written on 8 August 2014, 10:55am

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Strategy vs tactics

Strategy: the overall plan, the final purpose (What?)
Tactics: the actual means used to meet an objective (How?)
The strategy is an idea, the tactics is an action taken to execute the strategy

Efficient vs effective

Effective is doing the right thing.
Efficient is doing it in the optimal way.
Efficient and effective: doing the right thing in the optimal way.

Functional vs non-functional requirements

Functional: what the system should do
Non-functional: how the system should be
Utility: fit for purpose.
Warranty: fit for use.

Business vs Functional analysis

The business analyst is responsible for the business requirements; it reports to the Business. Answering more to questions like “What?” needs to be done, based on the business “Why?” it needs to be done.
The functional/technical/systems analyst takes the “What?” from the business analyst, and they are translating it into the “How?”.
The Business Analyst gets the requirements and the Functional Analyst looks at how the technical solution can be best used to meet those requirements.

SOA vs SaaS

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a software architecture design pattern based on distinct pieces of software providing application functionality as services to other applications. This is known as service-orientation. It is independent of any vendor, product or technology.

There are six main programming paradigms: imperative, declarative, functional, object-oriented, logic and symbolic programming (wikipedia).
Read more about declarative vs imperative programming