This got me thinking to an area where information is very thin on the ground: salaries. Why don’t people tell each other how much they earn? Why is it such a taboo subject? According to the theory if everyone knew how much their colleagues earned they’d be in a much better position to know what kind of salary they should be getting. Employers wouldn’t be able to offer unreasonably low salaries to people just because they don’t know how much they should be getting. Salaries should work on a system of supply and demand like every other market. If C# developers were paid twice as much as Java developers then people would train to fit the job that best suited their abilities and desired salary. At the same time the competition for jobs would drive down over-inflated salaries. Eventually the outcome – as with all free markets – would be that everyone was paid just enough to to be happy but not too much that someone else would offer to do the same job at a lower price.

Without knowing how much your colleagues are earning it is impossible to know how valuable the work you are doing is to the company. If a company wants people to work at their best they could offer benefits such as a performance related bonus. A lot of companies seem to have implemented bonus schemes without realising that unless employees know how much bonus they are getting or how much of the bonus is based on performance the bonus has no real effect at all. Also unless we know how large a bonus our colleagues are getting we have no method of relating performance to renumeration. The same reasoning explains why communism doesn’t work. If extra effort can only be seen as a benefit to others, no one will have a reason to try to perform any better than anyone else.

Perhaps a completely transparent salary might then encourage too much competition. People would threaten leave if they felt they were treated unfairly. In a work place it’s very difficult for anyone to have an objective opinion of their own or other people’s value as an employee. Perhaps a completely free market of workers would reduce the overall quality of work due to poor workers demanding the same salary as their coworkers or good workers continually switching from one company to another. Either way, all I know is that I’m not getting enough…

Modafinil and other drugs in its class are sold to help sufferers of Narcolepsy or ADHD but are widely used by people with no such conditions as a way of simply enhancing their general brain functions. Millions of us could benefit from holding better concentration while at work or at school. Or remembering things such as timetables or doing mental arithmetic.

There are few other non-medicinal self enhancement drugs that offer so much potential benefit to such a wide range of people. Caffeine seems to be the nation’s current brain fuel of choice but most people who take it regularly end up simply using it to abate the withdrawal symptoms of the caffeine taken the day before. The question therefore becomes, should people take drugs simply to better themselves? Should people be allowed to use them while taking or revising for exams? Should people be allowed to use them to gain advantages over colleagues at work? Why shouldn’t people be able to function at a higher level than they would naturally? After realising how much better they can be, why would anyone want to live a drug free life?

Personally I find it very difficult to concentrate throughout the day unless I’ve had at least 8 hours’ sleep. My job requires a high level of concentration and logical processing for which I need the highest level of alertness I can get. I would love to try a Modafinil some day just to see how much more code I can churn out in a day. What I’m not so sure about is do I want to need to take the drug every day in order to maintain the same productivity at work? Even if there’s no danger of physical or psychological dependence would I develop a functional dependence such that the drug effectively becomes a medicine rather than a self enhancement?

My theory is that if Modafinil came in a hot drink form, it would so conveniently replace coffee and tea that people would reject any attempts to limit its use by the government. Also it would probably need to be bitter in taste enough to discourage children from becoming dependent on it. Hmm I guess this is how consumption of caffeine and alcohol has worked for centuries. Isn’t it convenient to have traditional beverages to mask our widespread drug taking customs?

Not much else to report at the moment. The job is going ok still mostly staring confusedly at code all day. I predict that my next post will be either existential or ranting in nature.

Next thing is finding a place to live. Somebody told me today that life is full of compromises. I think that’s defintely true when it comes to finding somewhere to live. It’s a constraint satisfaction problem between size, location, quality, area, housemates and price. All the places I’ve seen so far have been severly wanting in at least two of those categories.

You may have noticed the vast gaps in time between my blog posts. Suprisingly this isn’t because I’ve got nothing to blog about but I just seem to have no time to make posts. Extrapolating my current post frequency I expect I will be making my next post from my nice comfortable new room somewhere in south London. Til then…

Anyway, these are some of the questions I remember which I was faced with almost as soon as I sat down:

1. Given an integer, how could you find out whether it was odd or even?
2. What properties does a Java Object object have?
3. Write a function that returns the factorial of a given integer.
4. Tell me what is wrong with this C code? (The code has a dangling pointer error in it).
5. Given an 8bit integer, how would you count the number of binary “ones”?
6. Given 8 coins, one of which is heavier than the others, how do you find the heavy coin using only two weighs of a old fashioned balance?
7. Describe a binary tree. What can it be used for? How long does it take to search? Why does it take this long?
8. Describe a hash table.
9. Given a list of words, how would you find which words contained an anagram of themselves within that list?
10. Given a list of words, how would you find the 25 most common words in that list?

I struggled answering questions 2, 4, 5, 9 and 10. I guess that’s why they didn’t want me. Still it was definitely interesting. I’ll have to research more about these questions and see if I can come up with some decent solutions.