To all interested in Keller interviews, I recommend Ian Cutress' interviews with him (Ian from Anandtech)
Cool you worked with him - Would've been neat to hear your thoughts but I understand keeping it to yourself
Haha, he does do that. In his interviews with Ian Cutress he's said that "He felt like he was done doing what he needed to do, so he moved on to the next challenge" about job changes
Yeah, that’s what they tell you to say when you’re at a job interview and the interviewer says “i notice you change jobs every 2 years…”
Yeah, that’s what they tell you to say when you’re at a job interview and the interviewer says “i notice you change jobs every 2 years…”
Of course, maybe I’m the weirdo. I stayed at Exponential until it went out of business, plus one month (long story). I only stayed 2 and a half or 3 months at Sun, but that place was horrible. Then I spent 9 years at AMD. I guess I never got done what I needed to do
The smart kids who were programming Apple II games in high school were peeking and poking directly into RAM, or via routines made out of poked 6502 op codes. When they saw C pointers, they said, "oh, that's poke with a cleaner syntax" and kept going.
I would imagine it’s difficult to be unwillingly unemployed in the chip design world at all.
Hm. Fair point. Maybe if you go into the interview and say
Hah!
Yep. I think I had to go to a lab they designated in New York, where I was, before they would let me fly out there for the interview. I can’t recall the details. Nobody else, not even the old school companies like DEC, HP or IBM ever made me do that.
Hah!
When I interviewed at Intel in 1992’ish, when I was graduating with my undergrad degree, I was being escorted to the conference room where the interviews would take place. I was already taken aback, because every place else I interviewed, they would take you from office to office for each interview, instead of sticking you in a conference room and having person after person coming. And they had made me pee in a cup first, which no place else did.
Anyway, I am walking with my host, and I hear people yelling at each other in various cubes or offices (can’t remember which) along the way. So I’m thinking “this place seems terrible.”
As we are walking, my host says hi to someone, and they have a brief little interaction. As soon as that person is out of ear shot, the host says “that guy is the one who screwed up the FDIV.”
I got an offer that week, and decided I‘d better go to grad school and try again later
Here's a trivia blast from the past: does anyone remember the command you would enter on an Apple II in BASIC to drop down to code in machine language? Hint: it started with "call -#". Can you remember the #? I can't believe I still have that in my head decades later....
My brother learned some Object Pascal quite some time ago. He never really went beyond the basics but when he tried to learn a bit of programming it was Object Pascal and the Delphi environment. He also wrote a tiny bit of HTML/CSS before putting all of that a bit behind him. Hasn’t touched code for a long time but he understands what I talk about more than the rest of the family, haha
Yes! Can you believe that number sticks in our memory from 30+ years ago? The mind is amazing.Call -151
and pr#6 to boot
We (programmers) do live in a different world than everyone else. I always love it when someone asks me what I did today. How do you explain something that would have zero meaning to them? Might as well say, "Pushed a lot of buttons!"
Think that goes for a lot of professions, really. Everything can be simplified. I mean we could also simplify our work. What did you do today? "I worked on making computer systems more stable". Not incorrect but certainly a simplification. Similarly a dentist might say "I fixed up people's teeth", but in reality, among themselves, they might talk about all sorts of stuff beyond our dental understanding. Or a lawyer might say they consulted people, where as among themselves they might say they, I dunno, mitigated a claim §32.1a section 4.
That was not a genuine story just to be clear - I mean I'm sure it's happened in my life but not recently. It was just a way of joking about the way my mind's been altered by being a programmer even in mundane situations
Part of the reason I don’t go to family gatherings anymore is because nearly everyone in my family works in medicine. I’m left out of every conversation for that reason!