Once upon a time, at the beginning of a phone interview with a company whose name rhymes with Oogle, which of course never happened and I can’t talk about, because Oogle does not exist, never has, operates completely on magic fairy dust, and I had to promise to acknowledge and respect that [1], I was asked to have a pen and paper handy at the start of the interview. I can’t tell you why of course, but it may take the prize of the most insulting experience I’ve had in an interview. Now granted, I’ve had worse requests, but this was insulting because this request was carefully planned rather than being your typical ignorance and falling on swords. Discussions in The Secret Club of Oogle Interviewees (SCOOI) has garnered agreement.

Completely unrelated, a quote from Hackers and Painters:

For example, I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complex program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging.

For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn’t hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to pgroam in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

Just saying.

[1] Sidebar: maybe you get what you deserve