I was onsite at a client site today when they experienced an issue with one of their systems. No problem, check the logs, and get them back online. Turns out that there wasn’t much helpful information in the logs as they decided to implement a terrible exception handling “standard.”
We’ve had a good bit of hiring activity lately and I thought I’d share some thoughts about our process and interviewing in general.
We’ve been using Massive for a few years now and have been very pleased with it. If you don’t know, Massive is a micro ORM that makes use of C#’s dynamic data type. Well, we stumbled across a bug the other day that had us scratching our heads for a while.
One of our clients’ email volume was easily in the 2MM+/month range as the company has a large sales force (100k+). Email is a critical component for them. It has to be reliable and timely so that they can effectively message, schedule, and direct those sales folks, often at a moments notice.
I was going to have to do what I feared the most: call customer service (and be on hold FOREVER). But then, I saw it . . . I could request a callback from them.
One of my favorite questions to ask interview candidates, (especially if they bring it up first) is about performance tuning. In fact, recently one candidate and I got into some questions about computational complexity, big O notation, and space / time tradeoffs which is definitely not the norm.
