I am disturbed by the "modern" #IT #interviewing process.

I detest those SAT-style, arm's-length interviews, where the interviewers keep tossing the so-called "coding interview questions", which they, themselves, swiped off a 50-year-old textbook by Knuth or Dijkstra. In the grand scheme of things, that the candidate can live-code a well-known algorithm in 5 minutes while under the glare of the interviewer bears no relation, whatsoever, to whether he would make a great teammate over the next several years. What is relevant is whether he can solve a problem that he has never seen before, in the collaborative environment of the existing team.

In other words, what truly matters is not whether a candidate knows how to implement an algorithm, be it FFT, or MST, or whatever, in a live-coding session, but whether he understands the algorithm's advantages, its limitations, its performance parameters, its appropriate uses, its edge cases, its historical context, etc., and whether he can save lives (or at least improve lives) using that knowledge.

Whenever I conduct an in-person interview of a senior-level candidate, I make the candidate feel welcomed, and I ask two or three senior level staff to conduct the interview together so that they can evaluate the candidate's philosophy, personality, and presence, as if he already were a team member, analysing and solving problems with the existing team members collaboratively, and having a blast doing it.

Indeed, this is how post-doc interviews are done at a typical university. The industry could learn a thing or two from this age-old academic process.

I didn't know that *wolves* can pollinate plants.

This is an Ethiopian wolf, the most endangered predator in Africa. These wolves like to lick sweet nectar off a flower called the Ethiopian red hot poker. And as they go from flower to flower, their muzzles get dusted with pollen! So while it's not yet *proved* that these wolves are important as pollinators, it seems awfully likely.

Scientists think these wolves don't get much of their caloric intake from this nectar. The “dessert hypothesis” says the wolves just like the taste!

For more, check out this open-access paper:

• Sandra Lai, Don-Jean Léandri-Breton, Adrien Lesaffre, Abdi Samune, Jorgelina Marino and Claudio Sillero-Zubiri, Canids as pollinators? Nectar foraging by Ethiopian wolves may contribute to the pollination of Kniphofia foliosa, https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.4470.