Write a routine, in your favorite language or even a mock language, without using an intrinsic function to solve the problem for you, to reverse the contents of a string. The routine should take an input of a string and output a string. For example, if the input is “hello” the output should be “olleh”.

I inform the candidate that it is a simple problem and invite them to talk through their logic as they write their solution on the whiteboard. I let them know it does not have to be syntactically correct; I am more interested in their approach.

It is enlightening, to say the least, to watch interviewees attack this problem. I’ve actually had so many people fail that I’ve been questioned if my “test” was too difficult. I understand there are abnormal pressures in play due to the setting but employees should ultimately perform decently under some pressure.

Silently I watch and listen to the candidate attempt to solve the problem. When the candidate is finished I usually ask, with good reason, are you certain this solution is correct? The response is often a “yes.” This usually gives us ample opportunity to talk about different strategies and try to understand why it was coded in a particular method.

I notice lots of issues that should not occur; for example, the candidate:

• does not understand the chosen language or it’s string libraries.
• has issues with zero-based arrays depending on chosen language.
• overly complicates the approach and never sits back to re-evaluate.
• can not come up with a solution.
• chooses a complicated approach involving math and gets the math wrong.
• uses too many variables.
• writes unnecessary code that essentially does nothing.
• can not validate the output of the routine they wrote correctly.
• writes more than ten lines of code to solve the problem.
• does not know how to swap values in to variables properly.
• … and many more.

I’d appreciate others offering this simple test and sharing your results with me and everyone else. I’d also like to know your thoughts the validity of this test and how you would let the results affect your view of the candidate.

Before reading on to see my solution, try it for yourself. Let me know how you do.

Here is my solution:

static string reverse(string s)
{
    string r = "";

    for (int i = s.Length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
        r += s[i];

    return r;
}

Can it be more simple? Let me know?

Being a new father to twins and often pondering the potential cost of education has guided my thoughts on this podcast. We desperately need a shift in the education paradigm; I’m not sure I’ll be able to offer a decent education for my children considering the current college trends. I imagine removing the walls of the learning institutions and replacing them with social networks. And as technology removes the language and distance barriers, social networking can be the driving force behind sharing knowledge – there are so many bright people all over the world.

I also thought about the Borg (Star Trek’s Next Generation version of a highly functional social network) and how a primary goal is to get smarter though collective thinking. Social networking can be used as the medium to add brainpower to solve problems. I would hope in the years to come that the focus of social networking is to share information allowing us all to get smarter.

I’m often seen reverting to a Cygwin prompt (typically in an XTerm Window – another technology that has made a reappearance in the shape of AJAX) to get stuff done. Repeatable. Reusable. Reliable. Command line: It’s the new black. (The last sentence borrowed from the Information Week article).

One of the many benefits I’ve received through marriage to my lovely wife is the opportunity to form an intimate relationship with fabulous people I would most likely not have met otherwise. One such person is Oma – my wife’s grandmother who also is a valued source of inspiration.

Every time I talk with her (thank goodness for Skype and email as she lives in the Netherlands) I am truly amazed and inspired. She is a 96 year old woman who is more active and vibrant that I am at times. In spite of the recent challenges she has had recently, she has remained focused, determined, and passionate about achieving her goals and has been successful. Her powerful examples are truly inspiring and have given me hope: not in the sense that life can be rewarding and invigorating no matter what age, but what is possible to achieve in spite of certain limitations.

Oma is obviously limited by her age but her process works well. She defines the desire, contemplates the process, determines the ability based on current factors and executes successfully, with fallback plans and flexibility. She lives outside the city limits of Amsterdam but regularly goes into the city to attend exhibitions and generally partake of the city life. Today we chatted about her visit to a Turkish exhibit at an old cathedral on the Dam and then she was describing her plans to visit a Sotheby’s Modern Art Charity Auction. Recently (in terms of a few months) she was asked to be in a Dutch TV movie called “Oma and Her Scooter.” (BTW, she doesn’t need one nor any other walking device!)

Oma, you inspire me.

Wow. Better the world and profit from it. What could be better?

There are some open source tools that are simply amazing. For example, I created over the course of three days a system that initially took me and a team of highly skilled engineers (many) months to develop. And I had to learn the development language and framework in addition to create the system. Of course, it doesn’t have the functionality of a mature system, but at three days old… holy cow!

But profit? Why not give it away for free? And in doing so, solicit feedback and improvements. And keep doing so until it becomes wothy of being a competitor. And then…still give it away for free. Why not? At some point, it becomes eligible to be labeled an enterprise app. And all because I gave it away. For free. And solicited feedback and even improvements.

An enterprise app. In some industries there are enterprise apps that are just evolutionary. With no catalyst for change. Enter the open source app. Used by thousands of solo practitioners. And improved upon as a result of feedback from those thousands of users. It becomes a compelling choice for the enterprise. Why not? Why be locked into an evolutionary product controlled by a sole provider? I’ve seen many “best in class” enterprise apps fail due to bad management decisions. Empower the user by giving them the control. And there is the opportunity for profit. Consulting opportunities to enlighten the user. Just so the user can control their destiny. Who wouldn’t want to pay for that?

As the cost of computing power began to fall, we were able to manage data, taking the information, practically verbatim from paper forms and tossing it in a database. Far from the ideal of paperless offices we all dreamed about, but a start. And very difficult to retrieve the information in a form other than how it was entered. So we managed the details of the information on the form and its layout. It wasn’t until the software developers gained a better understanding of relational databases and report development did that data begin to morph into information that could be managed. And as the cost of storage fell, the amount of data that could be turned into information grew exponentially. We are now caught in the age of information overload, but we have been developing technologies aimed at making sense of all that information. And the industry is moving along, although predictably and linearly.

It has been over 20 years of being data-centric and information-centric without real, disruptive technological advances. Certainly, Internet technology is disruptive, but it actually aggravated the problem of information overload, not helped it.

The world is shrinking, largely due to the Internet, the falling cost of storage and the associated rise in bandwidth. And as the world shrinks, its information paths grow more complex: information density increases and transmission time decreases thus creating massive amounts of data that are more difficult to comprehend in shrinking time.

Is the solution to improve our existing tools by making them faster and more cost effective? Or maybe to tweak the methodologies about how we approach the problem? These will help manage the problem, but cannot ultimately yield a solution.

As more information becomes readily available more quickly, we need to seek out means to manage our processes, otherwise we will be swamped. No longer can we massage the information to suite our needs, instead we must manage our processes to accommodate the information. If we fail to do so, others will easily pick up where we were left behind.

And because so much information is so freely and widely available, it is no longer our circle of competitors whom we must be weary. Change will come from the unknown or unseen, find and quickly fill an opening, and expand from there. And before it is realized, the spark will become a dominating force because the flexibility in process due to their small size permitted innovate thinking and execution.

We must allow some vulnerability in thinking these days. It is time to stop thinking and acting incrementally (at least in whole). We must yield our methods, although tried and true, to new business processes; processes that are generated from the advances in software development largely due to greater adoption of Open Source Software (see previous blog entry).

As our core competencies morph from managed information to their processes, we need tools to manage those processes. The processes now become tangible assets and must be managed or our managed information will grow less valuable.

Managing business processes as assets will revitalize software growth and become a catalyst for innovative breakthroughs that yield disruptive growth curves.