Cubicle Non-walls
Attention everyone who works in a cubicle:
We can hear everything you say on the phone. Really. If you’re talking loudly enough for the other person on the phone to hear you, then we can hear you too. Cubicle walls are specially designed to transmit and amplify sound.
I once overheard someone discussing a medical procedure. I tried not to listen. Oh how I wish I’d been able to tune it out. Way too much information! A couple months earlier, I overheard someone quote his salary. That probably wasn’t something he wanted to make public.
Why is it that a few people don’t seem to understand this concept? I’ve wondered about that for some time, and I have a theory: I think that 95% of the cubicle population understands this concept, and it only makes it worse for the 5% who don’t. You see, the 5% never overhear anything personal from other people’s conversations, because everyone else is careful. Since (1) they don’t hear other people making that mistake and (2) nobody points out their mistake, they continue under the delusion of privacy.
I had a coworker a few years ago (in another cubicle world) who was disgruntled with his job. He made many phone calls from his cubicle to old contacts looking for possible openings. [Note to self: don't do that.] The rest of the office couldn’t help but hear him discussing, in what he thought was a lowered voice, how he wasn’t happy at his current position. Eventually even his boss (who was in an office with real walls and a door) heard what he was doing and asked him about it. The poor guy later stopped by my cubicle and asked if I had been able to overhear him making phone calls. Apparently he had no idea that cubicle walls aren’t sound-proof. I felt badly for him.
Conference rooms tend to be open a little before the hour, after one meeting has ended a bit early and before the next meeting has begun. Great place for personal phone calls. Your cubicle: bad place. Are we clear?
Opposite Marketing
I’m fascinated by marketing. It intrigues me that you can influence people’s buying decisions by non-rational means. In fact, that seems to be the most effective way to influence people.
When I was younger, it used to deeply disturb me that my thinking could be influenced by advertising. I wanted to buy Crest toothpaste because it was the best product, not because Procter & Gamble had tricked my brain into associating their brand name with positive feelings. To counter the effects of any advertising I encountered, I would make it a habit to always contradict everything they said, out loud, during the advertisement.
“Crest fights cavities on teeth and roots. With regular brushing you can fight cavities and leave your breath feeling refreshed.” To which I’d reply, “So does every other toothpaste. So does baking soda and peroxide. My breath will ‘feel’ refreshed? You don’t even claim that it actually freshens breath; it probably doesn’t. Why should I waste my hard-earned money to pad the pockets of the marketing company that came up with this ridiculous commercial…” etc. etc. By doing this, I hoped to counteract whatever positive feelings the marketers had hoped to associate with their product. (I use Colgate.) This was also good practice to help me become the brusque and cynical person I am today.
More recently, I’ve noticed that many advertising campaigns are based on taking the worst attribute and claiming that the opposite is true. Joel Spolsky did a good job of explaining this phenomenom in the first couple paragraphs of an article on a completely different topic. He brings up plane travel advertised as comfortable, paper companies as environmentally-friendly, and cigarettes as symbols of active outdoor life.
Aldi’s bread is cheap and tastes fine, but you know it’s a few weeks old. What do they call it? L’Oven Fresh.
We had cable TV for a while growing up. It has a sizable selection of entertaining programming. That sounds like a reasonable basis for marketing. You’d probably want to steer away from mentioning that cable is a huge waste of time, a poor use of money, full of mindless drivel, and rather expensive. Time Warner’s most recent ad shows four people with the following quotes:
- Cable TV Is A Time Saver.
- It’s A Great Value.
- It Makes Learning Fun.
- It Helps Me With Expenses.
Huh? How do they get away with saying that? Do they think I’m that stupid? Or can the psychological power of repeated advertising cause me to change my mind about cable. Oooh, that’s scary. I’d better go back to contradicting the ads. Out loud.
Interview Questions
This week I helped perform 2nd-level interviews with some candidates for a position here at work. They all claimed to be good at Java.
Here are the questions I asked. (None of these questions were original. I found them various places on the web.)
- Write a class that represents a binary tree. A node in this tree holds only a single String value.
Write a method named ‘find’ that takes an argument of a String and returns a List of all the nodes whose value matches the argument. - If they had trouble with the previous question, I offered to let them answer this question: write code to count the on bits in a byte. Use any language.
- What does the “static” keyword mean in front of a variable? A method? A class? Curly braces {}?
- How many gas stations are in Rochester?
- A man needs to go through a train tunnel. He starts through the tunnel and when he gets 1/4 the way through the tunnel, He hears the train whistle behind him. You don’t know how far away the train is, or how fast it is going, (or how fast he is going). All you know is that (1) if the man turns around and runs back the way he came, he will just barely make it out of the tunnel alive before the train hits him and (2) if the man keeps running through the tunnel, he will also just barely make it out of the tunnel alive before the train hits him.
Assume the man runs the same speed whether he goes back to the start or continues on through the tunnel. Also assume that he accelerates to his top speed instantaneously. Assume the train misses him by an infinitesimal amount and all those other reasonable assumptions.
How fast is the train going compared to the man?
Of the three people we interviewed this week, not a single one could complete the binary tree code. Only one managed to create the class, but he couldn’t write the find method. They’ll probably hire him.
One of the tree-failures was able to write the bit counter code. I’m guessing his brain prefers to work procedurally.
The question about the static keyword tests a person’s depth of Java knowledge. I hate trivia questions in interviews, and that question was the closest I got. I don’t care whether you can remember specific API signatures, but you should understand the basic semantics of the language.
I was disappointed with the gas station answers I received. Everyone tried to guess based on how many gas stations were in their neighborhood. I should have picked a question that wouldn’t lend itself to that type of answer. Maybe next time I’ll ask how many tennis balls are in the air in the U.S. at this moment.
Nobody got the train question. Sigh.
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