ByMyReckoning

What questions can you ask the interviewer(s) at an interview and find out whether this is a nice workplace?

Here’s one approach: Ask the people interviewing you about their best experiences working for the company. Questions like:

1 What has been your best experience working at this company?
2 When do you have the most fun at work?
3 Who do you enjoy working with the most here? What do you like about them?
4 Which manager do you admire the most in this company? What do you admire about that person?
5 What’s the greatest thing your manager has done for his/her people?

You can ask the person interviewing you. If your future boss is at the interview, ask that person as well. Better still, would be an opportunity to ask some of your potential co-workers. Some companies make this possible, and that’s the best way to learn more about the company.

Why ask these questions those questions?

1. Because you’re asking about people’s own experiences,
2. They are hard questions answer with B.S without being too obvious.
3. They are all positive questions. Even if the person interviewing you is fairly pessimistic and a complainer, you will get some information on what’s good about this company.
4. If they think these questions are inappropriate then it's probably a good sign that they’re not remotely interested in providing a happy working environment.
5. Answering positive questions is likely to place people in a good mood, which means they’re more likely to like you and consequently more likely to hire you.

A friend of mine posed the following questions during last nights coverage of the cricket world cup.

• What does Bob Woolmers murder say about economic policy?
• Will Bob Woolmers murder affect house prices?
• Was Bob Woolmers death due to global warming?
• Bob Woolmer will come back to life so long as Milliband succeeds Blair, not that awful dour Brown chap.

He's wasted Zimbabwes huge opportunity to act as economic seed for all the surrounding nations. Compare his behaviour to that of the leaders in his neighbour South Africa. They've maintained a democracy and strong economy, whilst trying to feed and educate the people.

Some leaders are suited to fighting wars, but are useless at dealing with the subtleties of peacetime politics. He's still in wartime mode. It seems that whenever his views are challenged he moves to crush his opponent. He's just not the sort of guy you want running your country once the bogey man has gone.

Mugabe seems to think that the country belongs to him. These tendencies were apparent soon after the armed struggle ceased when he moved ruthlessly against his political rivals.

The Western media are revelling in the troubles there, but that doesn't mean what he's doing is OK.

He and they were/are involved in a strange dance in which they both gained from the 'white farmland grab'.

• The western media used it in a, 'I told you so. They can't govern themselves. We should never have given them impedance' manner.
• He has used it to distract black people both in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, by playing on their grievances, desire for justice and in the case of his cronies, sheer greed.

Although we may disagree with the slant that western news agencies are putting on the situation. We do not have to accept the evil behaviour of Mugabe, or allow him to manipulate our emotions by claiming (laughably) that he is some sort of media victim.

I've noticed an interesting post on Lambda the Ultimate which referred to a post over on the development blog of an online gaming site called Vendetta Online.

"The new erlang based system is now in production. For those who haven't been following, we ran into problems with our existing Lisp-based system (named "Deliverator") which handles high-level AI behaviour.. large groups of NPCs, large battles and the like. Over the last couple of months, we've been in the process of migrating to a much more scalable architecture (named "Kourier") based on Erlang, an elegant distributed-programming platform. Lisp has not yet been phased out, we have a hybrid combination of both for right now, while we migrate each part of functionality from Deliverator to Kourier. This is mostly happening on a case-by-case basis, for instance, Escort missions now run entirely on Kourier. But other, less-commonly-used functionality is still running on Deliverator and will be migrated as we move forward."

This interesting, but I still think that Scala could be stealing Erlangs thunder since it provides lower barrier to entry into FP and borrows the Erlang concurrency model.

In addition, from a marketing point of view, it may have a better name

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erlang, java, scala, lambda, concurrency, multithreading, Vendetta Online