The Interview Acronym Quiz

Here's an idea for your next technical interview - the acronym quiz! Have you ever thought of all the acronyms you've picked up over the course of your career? My first job out of school was as a programmer for a defense contracting company, where I was given an acronym reference book for our domain. I remember someone mentioning an acronym depth competition they had, where the winner was a an acronym 5 levels deep. (e.g. An example of an acronym 2 levels deep is SSA - SCUBA Schools International. 5 levels may have been an exaggeration, but 2 and 3 levels were common, and it was a ton of otherwise useless insider information.

But I digress. This post was about the half-joking idea of adding an acronym quiz section to a technical interview. Of course this has limited value, but it seems useful to answer if you need to go more in depth on a given topic or interview. For example, quickly answer what each acronym means:

1. SOA
2. XAML
3. JAXB
4. BFF
   

If your technical candidate didn't get #1, red flag. If they are supposed to know .NET and didn't get #2, red flag. Ditto in the java world for #3. Answer them all, and you just might up end being #4! :)

The wrong milk is coming out of my nose!

How many times have you grabbed the wrong type of milk and only noticed when you got home? Don't you just hate that? My regional grocer has 22 types of milk sold just under their label, and this type of packaging is sure to elicit some four letter words. Here's a sample of the problem:



Quick - grab a 1/2 gallon of non-RBGH skim for me, wouldja? Oh, and your 3 year old is whining for some chocolate milk. Better hope you don't grab the juiced-up-cow version on accident, or even worse, the friggin whole milk.

So if there are any graphic designers out there looking for a foot in the door at a certain grocer, here's a good opportunity to show them the light.

Oh, so this is how you use hibernate.

I've been using hibernate for a pretty long time (I was one of the micro donors to help them get hibernate.org), but it's always been a fairly black box to me. It seems every time I use it for a project, I understand something that I was not-so-blissfully ignorant of in the past. Today as I was writing some NHibernate mappings, I ran across this cheatsheet. It's a little out of date (substitute "role" with "name"), but it brings clarity in 30 seconds what the hibernate documentation rarely seems to do for me. It's not that the hibernate docs are bad, it's just that there's so many minute details, and not enough simple samples.

Anyway - kudos to the folks at NDP software.