Reflection on a Manifesto/Portrait

Upon reflection of my group’s Manifesto, I feel that I bear a strong resemblance to the described character. Surely, this is largely due to the fact that I myself wrote the Manifesto, but I do feel it also reflects a strong undercurrent in the Computer Science and Engineering student body. We felt that one of the most common characteristics to students in CSE was professionalism and strong workplace potential. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this trait, but one might expect a more prominent technical, geeky streak in such a department.

 

I certainly would not call our Manifesto a war cry. However, there undoubtedly was an air of humor or even satire in our artifact. I would not say there was an ulterior motive behind this, but we felt this feeling of good humor is common to our class and reflective of the people in it. At the end of the day, I think it’s incredibly important to be able to laugh at yourself. In a lot of ways, I think that’s what this Manifesto was about.

 

Overall, I do identify fairly strongly with our portrait. Sure there are some differences – I generally don’t wear a ton of Notre Dame gear and I did understand the “tabs or spaces” question (I’m definitely spaces by the way). But on the other hand, I did once attend a regional Hackton almost purely for resume purposes. Does a large population of our class fit the bill for this portrait? It’s obviously hard to say, but I believe finding someone who completely strays from this portrait would be a difficult task.

 

Perhaps our artifacts are inspired from a general stereotype of our major, but like most stereotypes, I think that’s because it stems from some form of a kernel truth. No it is not a blanket truth, but there are aspects that describe our CSE community. Stereotypes are everywhere. I don’t mean to suggest they are a good thing, but there’s no doubt they shape the way we see the world around us. The challenge is to have the self will to be able to consciously decide one’s own opinion of stereotypes. This is a challenge that will never disappear from adult life. In regards to the effects of artifacts, I don’t think they are either helpful or harmful. They are merely a lighthearted reflection on some of the features of an ND CSE major. Please don’t take them as cannon. Remember, we all need to laugh at ourselves every once in a while.

Reference to our artifacts:

 

https://pat73hat.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/manifesto-and-a-portrait-of-c-s-irish/

My Experience with the Hiring Process

I am very pleased to say that at this point in time, I am through the interview process and have accepted a full time job offer. I can personally comment to on two phases of interviewing – for an intern position during my junior year and for a full time position during the fall of my senior year. Both were certainly stressful and at times discouraging, but ultimately it worked out and I can happily say I was very pleased with my position this past summer and I cannot wait to start my job in August.

Since my interviews from this fall are most fresh in my mind, I’ll mostly focus on those experiences. My conversations with companies began literally during the first week of classes and concluded when I accepted my job offer in very early November. My interview experiences widely varied, as I was interested in positions with a more traditional software engineering description as well as ones that were closer to a technical consulting role. Ultimately, I ended up picking one that probably falls somewhere in the middle. As is commonplace for most of these types of positions, my interviews usually consisted of some form of a programming exercise for the SE positions and some form of a case interview for consulting positions. It is also worth mentioning that I normally had some form of a “behavioral” interview were I was asked about my background and my soft skills like dealing with a bad team member.

I can’t say there were necessarily a lot of surprises throughout my interviews, but that probably is due to the fact that I had already gone through the process the year before and my peers at Notre Dame tended to have a wealth of knowledge regarding what to expect. However, I can recall one interview that had similarities to the one described in Sam Pippen’s article. I was asked a number of in-depth question about Java and its constructs despite being very up front about not having extensive Java experience. Certainly, this was a frustrating experience. On the other hand, I had multiple programming interviews where the interviewer was incredibly helpful, and we ended up having some intriguing dialogue about how to approach software problems.

Overall, I found that one of the best preparation steps I took was researching the company before the interview. Not only would I sound more serious about the position, but it also put me in a position to ask really great questions. I could always feel the interviewer taking me more seriously when I asked the hard-hitting questions.

Looking back, I think I would describe much of my interview experience as fair and reasonable. I certainly had to perform some non-trivial technical tasks during my interviews, but I found that companies mostly cared more about my thought process and my ability to talk through a problem rather than writing flawless code in some restrictive time frame. It seemed that investigating my past projects and coding experience was the best way for me to demonstrate my skills. When I encountered companies that did want to probe me for extensive knowledge about some narrow coding task, I normally felt those would not be places I want to work for anyway. To me, that demonstrated a desire for a code monkey, rather than a problem solver with a diverse range of skills.

What is a hacker? Is it me?

To the outside world, I think most view ‘hackers’ as a quiet and frail fringe group sitting in a dark basement in front of a wall of screens, plotting their revenge on the ‘establishment.’ Simultaneously, hackers are modern day Johnny Rotten’s and anarchists who want to employ to the unconventional to show what the little guy can do. Sometimes this takes on a serious malicious undertone, but most of the time it’s dominated by an anti-establishment credo. To me, this might describe one small faction of hacker culture, but I am well aware that the definition of a ‘hacker’ is far less straightforward or simple.

I particularly agree with two sentiments found in Brett Scott’s piece. Scott argues that, “the hacker is ambiguous, specializing in deviance from established boundaries, including ideological battle lines. It’s a trickster spirit, subversive and hard to pin down.” He also subscribes to Steven Levy’s notion that, “Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems – about the world – from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things.” These characterizations point out a few very crucial underpinnings of the hacker archetype.

Firstly, Scott acknowledges the vagueness and difficulty in describing the nature of a hacker. Hackers can take on many forms, but there are a few key components that tend to continually reappear. These traits include a tinker’s spirit and the desire to find interesting tricks within the bowels of a system. I feel this is consistent among hackers, but the motivation for why hackers conduct their bidding is far less homogenous. Some fit the anarchist spirit; some fit the hobbyist engineer brand, etc. It really is hard to pin down this aspect of the hacker.

To some degree I identify with this characterization. I always describe my interest in engineering and computer science in the simplest way that makes sense to me – I like knowing how things work. I thoroughly enjoy the process of discovering how a process unfolds from the ground up. However, I do not feel limited to just computers or engineering systems in this regard. I have also found business and political processes to be just as fascinating to dissect (things that are categorically un-hacker like). Additionally, I am not sure that I possess as strong of a tinker streak. I fundamentally care most about understanding the how one cog turns another or how one block of code influences the next. So one hand, I care about taking things apart, but the other I’m not so sure the trickster gene is so strong in my DNA.

Despite this, I must admit my romanticism with the ‘hacker’ image. I understand that I might not exactly fit the bill, but part of me does wish I could obtain this genius turned rebel status. I’ll even admit to purposely leaving my “Enter the Matrix”, green and black terminal on full screen in public places so that I might portray to the untrained passerby that I am not-so-discretely hacking into the NSA’s mainframe and uncovering national security secrets. In reality I’m really just tweaking my run-of-the-mill Python parsing script, but hey, poser-hackers can dream too right?

Is Computer Science an art, engineering, or science discipline?

Perhaps this is a cop-out, but I do not think it makes sense to silo computer science in one of these three disciplines. I think all three of these titles apply to computer science. At times, one may be more appropriate than the other, but there are aspects of art, science, and engineering in computer science. I also do not think computer science is unique in this way. The same could be said of mechanical engineering, ceramics, or neuroscience. I also think it is wrong to portray science, art, and engineering as so different from one another. They all involve a process of thinking and craftsmanship that involves hypothesizing, planning, implementing, testing, and evaluating. There is much overlap between all of these, and when we attempt to segregate them from one another we promote that idea that an artists can be engineers or scientists can’t be artists. The reality is this that the combination of these skills are what lead to great computer scientists. 

Blog Post #1

Hello! My name is Tim Pusateri and I’m currently a senior computer science major here at Notre Dame. I’m originally from Sewickley, Pennsylvania, which is a suburb northwest of Pittsburgh. While I am a computer science major, I wouldn’t say I’m much of a technology guy. I generally wish technology was less pervasive in our lives, and I hope I can develop software that helps with this task. I’m a big believer in being “in the moment.” Take for example, being at a concert. Seeing live music is perhaps my favorite thing in the world, and I’m consistently baffled at other concertgoers who are texting or browsing their iPhones during a show. There are so many fascinating things right in front of us, but I’m worried we get prefer to retreat to the LED screens in our hands, or now on our wrists. This is definitely one of the biggest questions that concerns me about computer science. Are we going too far? Do we really need micro processors ingrained in every object? Should there be any restriction on what we infuse with software? What are going to be the long term impacts on people of this trend? I think one of the most interesting challenges for computer scientists going forward will be to find ways to minimize the invasiveness of software, but still maximize its efficiencies.  I’m really hoping we can discuss some of these issues in this class.

Apart from being a walking contradiction, I really enjoy being outdoors. Hiking, snowboarding, longboarding, and biking are some of my favorites, but I’m generally up anything that involves fresh air. I’m also pretty obsessed with my dog, Buzz Lightyear (or just Buzz for short). He still lives at home with my parents, much to my displeasure. To be honest, most of my interests these days center around having as much fun as possible for my last semester of college. Me and my boys only have four months left together, gotta live it up while we can!