A few interview tips from the other side of the table:

1. Bring a laptop

I mean come up man! Bring a laptop. Especially if there was some kind of project or challenge to present. I have seen so many people do a big UI design presentation and then come in like “can I use your laptop???”. Of course you can, but your looking very unprepared.

2. Ask for clarification

Communication problems happen in business every day. Different cultures and accents can cause issues. The important part isn’t wether you understand everything said but that you ask enough questions to make sure you eventually understand. Most people just wrongly assume things and start rambling.

3. Know what kind of company you and talking to

In my case, this is a startup. We aren’t IBM or Amazon or Google. We work hard and we play hard. Work life balance is important in life but if your very first question is “work/life balance???” then you played yourself. Wait a bit, pepper it in on the sly. Just don’t ask it right away, it shows us that you aren’t ready to work harder than usual if needed. Maybe try “so how do you like working here? How are the people, hours etc?” Or something besides the first question being a bad signal.

Just some random tips for an interviewer.

From me to you, don’t make me have to tell you like DJ Khalid would ...

Congratulations, you played yourself.

I kinda wish they called programming lanuages programming dialects

I feel like im still writing in English, the message I am trying to convey to the computer is the same. To me they all just have different accents and ways about doing things

When I started cracking up at this, I feel like everyone in the restaurant must have thought I thought southern accents were hilarious or something...

New guy (good friend) is on the line with me shadowing. OMFG THESE PEOPLE HAVE HEAVY ACCENTS. Only reason I can hear them is my babysitter has a heavy Vietnamese accent as well, so I'm used to it, but HOLY CRUD this is painful. I feel bad for my newest teammate

Is it even legal to code with accents on your variables? 🤔

I might have told this in other rants, but this thing (requested from the client) is one of the worst thing I've ever done.

So we were developing a website to find the stores of a certain brand across the country, specifically: Italy.
In Italy, a lot of towns have accents and apostrophes in their name.
Client managers wanted ALL DATA to be capitalized, including letters with accents, but the client management was using Windows and Windows doesn't simply let you enter capital letters with accents from the keyboard, so the client requested to make a procedure to turn every apostrophe into an accent, therefore a town named like "CA' DEL BOSCO" would be "CÀ DEL BOSCO" (which is wrong) as they just couldn't bother copy-pasting from Word.

An important thing to notice is that most Italian towns with apostrophes don't have accents and most towns with accents don't have apostrophes, and that specific routine couldn't figure out what to exactly, so we ended up having all the stuff messed up.

The feature was a total SHIT, but the client was extremely happy with it, so we didn't even bother arguing with that.

!rant // since learning most of my programming on the internet, I must say I have grown accustomed to Northern European and Indian people trying to describe programming concepts in English with wonderful accents.

Thank you internationals, you sound much more soothing than American teachers.

In another news. COVID-19 continues to ravage certain places of the world. Most notably India (for right now)

Is there a mathematical correlation between this and the decrease of scam calls asking about your social, vehicle warranties, IRS frauds etc?

A friend mentioned that he has not gotten scam calls in a while now, I noticed this as well. I would normally have vendors contact me daily, vendors with shitty practices and poor sounding accents that insist on them having names such as "Joe" or "Steve". This sucks for India since I believe it is a country with absolutely beautiful cultural heritage and good people. But man, the decrease in scam calls from there is outstanding now.

Just finished another conference call. Broken voices, confusing accents and awkward silences. How do you guys handle it?

Not gonna lie. Graduate program has gotten me 100% absolutely miserable. I dunno if it is the institution or what. But shit man. I really don't wanna do it anymore as much as when i started with this institution. Might look into other options, but first class is definitely a pain in the dick. The ammount of hw is too much, the concepts are hard, but my biggest pain: the professor and the teaching assistants. Their accents are out of this world and they just can't speak proper English.

Might go to more....err....caucasian places.

Did I ever tell anyone how much I hate phone interviews? I have had them where people were on speaker phone and I could hardly understand them, foreign accents I could not understand or people reading questions off of the internet. I usually have to do these while walking around the parking lot on my job. My hands and ears freezing in the cold or 100+ degrees in the summer. I just hate it. Now I feel better. Oh yeah I have a country accent so I am doomed from the start anyway. ByVal or ByRef ? Difference between abstract and interface? Here we go again.

I have hundreds of Udemy courses I'm enrolled to. I hoarded them when they offered free coupons a few years ago. I realized most of them are trash, sharing wrong information with their thick accents. There is no option to unenroll, just archive. It feels dirty knowing they are still there, like ghosts hiding behind the curtains. Hoarding is a disease. I need to get rid of the noise. There is so much noise in today's world. Send help.

Been trying to update some really old C++ piece of code.
And all the comments and variable names are in FR*NCH.
Apparently they didn't had accents in the keyboards back then, because they used stars instead.
Makes it really hard to tell commented code from French comments.

Obs: I don't speak nor can read French. Neither does anyone in my team.

I work and live in Italy, if any of you know Italian, you'll probably know there are a few words with accents and also a few locations with accents in their names.

There was this big client for which we built a CMS and the were to insert the names of the vendors of their network, for each vendor there also was the address.

There were SO many addresses with accents and they just couldn't write capital letters with accents, so in the end, I had to make a function to capitalize everything including accents in the CMS.

I know i could have just used the text-transform:uppercase directive in CSS, but... whatever, they kept paying a shitload of money

I love reading code samples where the author was clearly very talented and up to the task, but had clearly used a different language up until that point, so they write with a strong accent. The C# codebase I'm working on right now for example had clearly been written by Delphi programmers

Two Chinese characters spoke Chinese in Silicon Valley, but their accents are pretty much the same as Siri on my phone.... lol

Yet another unusual take for the Orchid STL: Unicode codepoints aren't a part of the string library.

For the purposes of a high level language, the unit of text is a grapheme. Strings can be converted between Unicode and binary blobs. In a binary, indices address bytes. In text, indices address graphemes. For example, searching a string for a substring that consists of a single letter implies the added constraint that the letter must not have accents or other modifiers.

For storage and transfer optimization it's possible to discover the byte length of a string without converting it to binary

Is it just me, or does it sound like some people's accents say: "hatechtml." Those people probably also say "Jaah vuh script." Kinda funny....

I like watching the videos on the qt website where engineers with foreign accents describe their love of the framework it's kind of amusing

It's kind of a massive framework it takes up decent disk space !

Maybe Ill win the battle and finally eb able to keep photos of myself much diminished as these people apparently try to hide how hot I was in my actual 40s

Certainly had a slimmer waistline lol
Now I got that lower belly gut I'm working off slowly yay

Bottle of wine yesterday prolly didn't help but the 11 miles of walking today and the workout prolly balanced that out.

Need to get to running some more
Did that the other day doing sprint walks and poured goddamn sweat !