Daily 5 Minute Journal - March 8, 2016

Where's my F@#ken Lunch

Today, I went to the kitchen at work to get butter so I could make my Bulletproof Coffee. When I got there my butter was gone.  There was a sign on the refrigerator that said "All food will be removed on Friday March 4th" which I did.  So on Monday I bring in my butter but notice that the refrigerator isn't that clean. When I go to get my butter it's gone. I had also wrote all over the box.

Do not throw out!!
My name
phone number.

 But it was gone. I got so angry that someone threw it out. It turns out they came to clean out the refrigerator on Monday and not Friday.

Later in the day I realized that it was only $4.00 and there are people who don't even have food. It wasn't the end of the world.

Interviews

I interviewed 2 people today and some things I need to do and noticed.

Both resumes had summary sections which were way too long. Summary means summary and not 385 words.  There is a general rule of presenting data in 7+/-2 which means a bulleted list should have from 5 - 9 items. The same goes for PowerPoint slides, number of people reporting to a manager, chapters in a book, etc.

When I see a resume its the first impression I have of the candidate. They're setting me up for a negative confirmation bias. I feel that the resume is an assignment the candidate does. If it is sloppy, too long, has typos it reflects how they'll perform on the job. A bad resume can show an inattention to details, not caring, not verifying what the recruiter is sending out.

I showed this to two managers and one said it's okay for a programmer but not okay for a manager. The other manager said that it doesn't correlate with work performance and that these guys don't have to be great writers or marketing wizards.

These were both phone interviews today and I couldn't understand the first candidate. He seemed smart enough but was very hard to understand. I almost ended the interview early, but didn't. When considering a candidate I hire people at the company I work for as if it was my own business.

The second candidate appeared to be lying to me. We are looking for people with Tableau and Apache Drill skills, but this candidate made it seem like he did these on the job but didn't. I found this out by asking very specific questions.

One of the things I noticed that the resumes repeated terms over and over. I'm not sure if this was to do well on search, but have two resumes if you're doing this. One for the search engines and one for the interview. Before the interview I developed a spreadsheet that counted the words used.

I did this by copying the text from the resume and importing the text delimited by space, Then I ran a script that created one column out of the data. I removed blanks with filtering and then ran a pivot table to get word counts.

Resume #1

• and - 6.3%
• Data - 2.5%
• Hive - 1.2%
• Java - 1.2%
• Hadoop - 1.0%
• ETL - 0.7%
• MapReduce - 0.7%
• Pig - 0.7%
• Sqoop - 0.6%

Resume #2 (2,240 words)

• and - 6.3%
• Data - 3.2%
• Hive - 1.5%
• SQL - 1.1%
• HDFS - 0,9%
• Hadoop - 0.9%
• Pig - 0.9%
• Sqoop - 0.8%

The routine to extract this data is:

Sub ConvertToOneCol()

Dim i As Long

'select data and paste into sheet set the delimiter to space, comma, period

'set the 26 below to the last column

lr = FindLastRow(1)

'Find the last column

For i = 2 To 26 'the 26 is the last column

    Cells(1, i).Select

    r = FindLastRow(i)

    Range(cl(i) & "1:" & cl(i) & r).Cut

    Cells(lr + 1, 1).Select

    ActiveSheet.Paste

    lr = FindLastRow(1)

Next

End Sub

The above routine uses two functions:

• FindLastRow( )
• cl( )

The first function returns the last row of the passed column. The cl function does a column lookup converting column i to it's letter equivalent. For example cl(27) returns AA.

This seems like it would be a nice webpage to extract word counts. One strange thing I noticed was that two different resumes used the word "and" 6.3% of the time. That's just weird.

One thing I just learned is that before you develop a tool, see if someone has already solved this problem. https://wordcounter.net/ solved this problem and I could have saved time by just using their webpage instead of developing the code myself.

I still need to have better questions for the interviews I do and prepare not before the meeting.

How will I get to the next step and what is the next step?

I'm not sure what's next for me. I'm working on a bunch of projects both at work and at home.  My list of projects in prioritized order based on time spent is:

1. Daily Blog
2. Twitter
3. Super Productivity
4. Health
5. Excel Class

No Rain - Blind Mellon

This song came up in my Google play today and I like it.

Penalty Kill Hockey Sticks

While watching the Islander game during a penalty kill I saw a player's stick break, so the 5 on 4 became a 5 on 3. There should be special sticks for when you're killing penalties so that your stick doesn't break.  Just a thought.

Better Call Saul

I liked this week's Better Call Saul. I could do without the scenes of Saul's brother but the scene with Mike and Tuco was really good. I'm leaving out the details because I don't want to spoil it if you didn't see it.