Category: Corporate America

SELECT * Analogy

The DBAs at the company I work for sent out a mass email this morning “reminding” developers that using SELECT * is a bad idea. One of my friends, who usually asks me about database questions was confused about one part of the email:

If implementing these changes for an existing application, the percentage decreases will be off the time to process columns and not necessarily off the total currently used by the SQL statement.

And I came up with what I thought was a pretty good analogy:

Let’s pretend the database table is a grocery store, and you need to buy ingredients so you can bake a cake.

“SELECT *” would be like taking every single product in the store home and then figuring out which ingredients you actually need to make a cake.

Selecting individual columns would be taking your recipe with you and getting only the ingredients you need.

It still might take you a while to go through the store, especially if it’s one of those huge mega-marts (a.k.a, a really big query with lots of joins) to find the ingredients you need, but only getting the products you need will make things a lot faster when you get home.

Maybe Corporate America Doesn’t Hate Me So Bad…

Got a call-back from a company that I interviewed with earlier during the summer. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to land that particular internship because of scheduling conflicts. They were going to require me to work from 1-5 every afternoon, but I wouldn’t be able to do that because I have a class from 2-5:30 (I think, it’s only half a semester, which accounts for the lengthy lecture time).

Apparently, I was a pretty awesome candidate, as the recruiter called me back earlier today asking me to come in for another interview. The internship this time would be much more flexible in hours, so it’s worth a shot.

Interview’s at 3:30PM on Wednesday, so wish me luck around that time. :-)

Target Makes Me Angry.

So, basically since I got out of school, I’ve been trying to get a job. Unfortunately, companies apparently don’t like or me or something, and I am still unemployed.

The closest I got was from Target, but as I’m sure you can tell from the title of this post, that it didn’t go so well. I now recount why:

I got my first call from them on May 18. The lady said that I should be there for an appointment at about 1 PM on May 20 (Wednesday). Doesn’t say what I’m going to be interviewing for (I selected “Up for Discussion” or equivalent) on the application), just be there. OK, so I get there, and I have to wait almost 30 minutes before the person doing my interview comes available. A bit annoying, but not too bad. So, I do my interview and think I did decent. Not extremely good, but not bad. The manager in charge of my interview doesn’t give me a date that I should hear back by, but after a week I decided that it’s been (too) long enough.

I call back on the twenty-seventh to check back in on my application. The first person I talk to informs me that she’s not in charge of that area that I’m being considered for and to call back again later, because the person who is is on lunch break with some interns or something. OK, fair enough. So, I call back, ask for this person, who then tells me that they don’t know, and they’ll call me back. Again, I suppose this is fair enough, but to be honest, I wouldn’t have minded staying on the phone a bit longer so I could get an answer faster. So, later that night, she calls me back asking to come in for a second interview on Friday (the 30th).

Cool, a second interview, that’s usually pretty good, right? So, I got to the interview, do pretty good again, I think, and this time I make sure that she tells me when I should expect to hear back. She says on Monday. Monday comes around, I hear nothing. OK, I’ll give them a day, and then call them back. So, on Wednesday, I’ve still yet to hear from them, and I call back. The person who answers me tells me these exact words: “Yeah, I think they’ve made a decision, but I don’t know what it is. We’ll call you back or send you a card.” OK, two things: If you know they’ve made a decision, then I think it would just be proper to tell the person to stay on hold while you go and find out. I’ve already called them back at least 5 times by now to figure out if you’re going to do anything about my application or not, just to hear basically the same message (“We’ll call you when we hear something”, which is apparently never.)

So, I wait another week and give them another call. This time, the lady (same one who said that she thought they’d made a decision but didn’t know) answered again, and told me she’d find out and took my phone number. I’m like, cool, things might be looking up. Well, that Friday (the 18th, exactly a month after my first call), I get a postcard in the mail from Target saying this:

Hello, thanks for taking the time to apply with us. While we’re unable to offer you a position at this time, we do appreciate your interest in Target.

So, not only have the motherfuckers wasted my time (not only just a month of time wasted that I could have been looking for another job, but they gave me two interviews), but I didn’t even get the job. The Target hiring system (at least at my local Target) is incredibly inept.

Now, you may think the story with Target is over. I’ve been declined for a job, so there can’t be much more I can bitch at in regard to the management, right? Wrong.

So, (probably) the only reason that I got an interview from Target in the first place was because my dad works with someone who is the brother of the Target General Manager, right? Apparently the brother (not the manager) was wondering if my dad was going to help him re-tile the bathroom of his mother’s rent house (which happens to be where the manager is living right now). So, my dad was like, “Well, I don’t know if I’d wanna work for him, he didn’t hire my son.” So the guy called up the manager and my dad talked to him on the phone, and he said that I have a “meeting” with him personally in the morning. Pretty sweet, right?

Wrong. I get all dressed up for an interview-type thing that morning and drive all the way to Target. I go up to the Customer Service desk and ask to speak to the manager, and the person there says, “He’s left for the day.” “What? He said he would be here until 12:30” “Well, he must have thought we would be, but had a shorter day than he planned.” This was at 10:00 AM, mind you. Now, please, if anyone can explain to me how a General Manager of a Target store can only work from 8-10 and be “done”, then I’ll give you a cookie.

This whole thing just pisses me of.

And I still don’t have a job. =(