Sunday, July 26, 2020
By:
Looking back on past interns’ experiences with the famous SPS boat ride, and presented with the last chance to see family friends before they sold their house in the South Tahoe Keys, I decided to take advantage of working remotely this week.
I had an amazing time, and was able to still submit my work and communicate with my supervisors at NIST. Saturday was both the day we went out on the lake, and the day I spoke again with Steve, the headhunter. The conversation went great. Steve asked me about my philosophy on documenting code while under a tight deadline. I explained that my belief was that it was the efforts of the entire group which would make the company money not what I wrote alone, and that if my code was difficult to implement then it didn’t matter how good it was. A high group velocity is what these companies want for their bottom line.
As someone with ADHD, I normally see my non-linear thinking as a strength. But its weakness is that “firing from the hip” is not always clean and accurate. Coding requires the opposite and I actually relish it, similar to baking v.s. cooking stir-fry. Just for my own optimized workflow, I comment every 2-5 lines on the fly. This deliberate choice has already paid so many dividends at Lawrence Berkeley Labs when supervisors or colleagues examine what I write.
I told the headhunter that any code I submitted for the team needed to clearly communicate what each block of the code did and the purpose of each function. This not only would allow the team to work efficiently, but would be necessary for debugging any problems on the fly. He was really impressed with my answer, and noted that some applicants would fall for the trap of saying they would submit the code ASAP.
I enjoyed my time on the lake and continued to remind everyone that this is a headhunter interested in helping me apply to a job opening. The company doesn’t even know I exist yet. Nonetheless, I worked on the industry 1pager for AMO, and coded up my first regression results!
Max Dornfest