Actually, I'd say the #1 thing not to ask me in an interview is "What is your passion?".
Did you really want to hear about my time between the sheets with my wife? No.
Did you really want to hear about my love of outdoor Humans vs Zombies games, or the different kinds of Munchkin games? No.
You probably wanted to hear about my work as a hobbyist Computer Science researcher, but I don't want to tell you about that. You would understand half of it and then decide that I'm a grad-school egghead who doesn't belong at your company.
In other words, you will do what 99% of all applicants will do, even the ones that didn't really want the job in the first place: you'll tell the interviewer what you think they want to hear.
The lesson here is: "asking questions" does not equal "having a conversation". No amount of lists, short or long, will result in a good job interview.
>In other words, you will do what 99% of all applicants will do, even the ones that didn't really want the job in the first place: you'll tell the interviewer what you think they want to hear.
Well no, I tend to do the Luciferian thing: tell the complete truth and let them hear what they please.
This has, in its time, lost me a couple of opportunities because they didn't want someone who was aiming for research rather than aiming for their position. Of course, those opportunities were in entry-level software engineering positions.
The people who ask what your passion is and are looking to hear that you program for the heck of it are simply trying to cash in. Likely you'll be willing to work longer hours and get paid less then your knowledge is worth because you'll get to work on "exciting and challenging stuff!".
I've met several people who think this is the only way to hire "real" programmers. They never get it when I point out that no other profession operates in this manner.
What these same people also fail to realize is that just because you enjoy working on "exciting and challenging stuff!" doesn't mean you will find debugging their firm's spaghetti code exciting.
Yes, there are projects on which I would work 10-15 hours a day with minimal pay but, odds are - yours isn't one of them.
Did you really want to hear about my love of outdoor Humans vs Zombies games
My personal experience as an interviewer: there is a very high correlation between people who are really into something and people who are good hires. Ideally something that requires some suffering to do well (e.g. sports) but what I'm looking for is that whatever it is, they feel strongly enough about it to pursue it doggedly for years at a time.
Frankly, if you can stretch your degree into an additional year or take summer classes, do it. My primary regret from university (May 2011) is that I graduated in 3.5 years.
On the one hand, I had no debt. On the other hand, crunching my requirements down that way meant that I often had scheduling conflicts with interesting but non-mandatory courses like Cryptography, Networking, Computer Graphics, Robotics, Philosophy, and Sci-Fi Films.
I did my BS academic time in 3 years and partly agree with this statement here. On one hand, doing the absolute minimum delivers minimal or no debt; saves time; and gets you into the full-time, non-intern/co-op workplace faster (a larger paycheck and potentially more interesting stuff) and out of the classroom. I optimized for time, cost, and good grades. As I never liked lectures as an education medium (mostly boring) and hated the BS of American college curriculum requirements (even after shaving a year off with course credit from high school, there were still unnecessary requirements), I was satisfied with the result from the view of time spent.
On the other hand, doing a minimal degree delivers minimal results. I didn't develop a focus for what I wanted to do professionally with my degree because I only took minimum requirements. The degree program just seemed like a to-do list, and all I wanted to do was check off boxes. I didn't have time to go deeper into something; this may have affected job prospects. I got a degree to do software engineering but didn't establish what I should do with software engineering beyond getting a job as a software engineer. I got a good job out of college but probably missed out on other opportunities.
Regardless, the choice of whether to compress the schedule or extend should be relative to an individual's needs. For example, if you can't afford large college debt, compress the schedule to what is affordable. Work out the trade-offs.
If you made $250k and lived off $50k/year, after taxes and about 6 or 7 years you'd have $1 million in the bank. After 10 years you'd definitely have enough to generate a perpetual income from your invested wealth.
But that's, again, different from STRIKING IT RICH(TM).
Should the kind fashion experts at JC Penny's mandate what you wear, comrade? Should your mechanic prescribe your car, along with the distance you are allowed to drive and at what intervals? Constrained by common sense government guidelines, of course; backed by bureaucratic approval and studies designed to prove whatever the bureaucrats want.
I can't imagine someone voluntarily giving away their freedom to choose what to put in their bodies, but people like you do it every day. It's a shame that your misguided decisions take away my freedom as well.
You clearly have sufficient wealth and/or insurance to make such a decision. Most people don't, and either get a short list of approved doctors and procedures, or wait until it gets bad enough to go to the emergency room. These people are not choosing anything.
Of course you can shop around for a doctor who will diagnose and prescribe what you want. All you have to do is find someone who will completely disregard medical ethics in the name of being paid to give you expensive happy pills.
And there are plenty of doctors that will do this.
I'm not making a value judgement, I'm just making an observation. The way I see it, the less drugs needed to keep me operational, the better. So I choose that kind of doctor. But other people like their drugs, and choose doctors that prescribe drugs.
Craigslist is just a listing site (create > discover). Uniiverse is an end-to-end marketplace, with integrated payments (create > discover > book > pay > review).
One of the few things that actually stands to make a difference in this zone is the possible implementation of crowdfunding laws. If small, new businesses like start-ups could actually raise investment through crowdfunding (ie: through people who don't have the 1%-er status to qualify as accredited investors), it would be possible to use capital sources not already controlled by the existing players.
Ah, the old Giga Drill Breaker model. Easily said, a joy if done willingly, but an incredible pain to make others go through. Group heroism is... difficult.
They advertise no jobs at all outside of San Francisco and Houston. They base everything on GitHub, screwing over those of us who have been using Sourceforge, Google Code, Bitbucket, or some other open-source hosting service since forever. The first problem they can fix; the second is the fault of basing a business model on the institutionalization of the fad for GitHub.
Those are both non-issues. They're a startup. Their product is a two-sided marketplace, naturally geographically limited. Any other open source hosting service would do just fine. It may happen that github is the most insular and the one most likely to have a critical mass of programmers in certain skill sets (it seems to massively dominate for Rails folks).
