Month: July 2020

Perdido En La Traducción

Perdido En La Traducción

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Today my kids had to choose between virtual and socially-distanced on-campus learning for this fall semester (thanks COVID-19). The selection process involved picking their high school from a drop-down on the district website. Oddly we couldn’t initially find their school (Del Norte) in the list.

Why not? Well, it turns out that Google Chrome’s auto-translate feature was attempting to be helpful, and transformed it into “From North”. Which made me realize three things:

  • I’m really thankful to be techie and able to debug such issues, because I imagine this will cause confusion for those less clued-in to potential browser oddities.
  • It’s really hard for computers to do be “smartly” helpful in a transparent way; if an algorithm isn’t darn near perfect it’s likely to do more harm than good.
  • The implementor should have added translate=no to their <html> tag to avoid this problem altogether.
Descend Into The Particulars

Descend Into The Particulars

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When I’m asked about interview advice, one suggestion stands far above the rest: be specific.

I want to hear real stories about events that actually happened, not hypothetical situations you might come across in the future. Having a real story to tell that only partly addresses the question is better than a direct answer with no experience to back it up.

Tell me the actions you individually took in the situation, not what the team generally did. A job interview is not the time for false modesty. Be humble and honest about it, of course, but you’re the subject of the interview, not your colleagues.

Explain not just what you did, but how the situation turned out. What were the actual results? If you have metrics or other data you used to measure the outcome, even better, and if you can quote actual numbers, that’s the holy grail.

Finally, what did you learn from the experience, and how would you apply that to future situations? A discussion on learnings is never out of place, no matter the interview question.

Bonus tip: don’t be afraid of negative examples. No one is perfect, and most future successes are predicated on prior failures. As long as you can articulate how the situation changed you for the better, it’s a plus in your column.