The standard procedure for this employer is to give candidates a simple phone screen before arranging an interview. Personally, I feel that having one person make a decision about whether or not I’ll “fit well with the team” after 10 minutes on the phone is ludicrous, but that’s the game I had to play.

During the phone call, I was asked several generic questions about Java. I gave what I felt was correct answers to the questions, but the interviewer wasn’t happy with my results. Every time I answered a question, I heard “Well, I was looking for…”, with the expected answer simply being a different wording of what I had said.

I chalked this up to the interviewer simply being used to different terminology than I for the same concepts, so I was a bit surprised when I wasn’t called in for an in-person interview. It wasn’t until a few days later that I realized that the answers I was expected to give told me quite a bit about the company, and that I wouldn’t have been happy working there had I been offered the job.

The particular question that stuck in my mind was a simple one. “What are some of the benefits of the introduction of generics in Java, especially in collections?”

I gave the answer that pretty much anybody familiar with Java generics would give: compile-time type checking, no need for casting objects, etc. What I got from the interviewer was “Well, I was looking for the fact that you don’t have to do instanceof checks all over any more.”

On the surface, this may seem like another way of saying what I said, but it’s actually quite different.

Before generics, you would need to cast objects to the proper class when retrieving them from a collection. This does not mean that you would be using instanceof to do this. The only situation I can think of that requires using instanceof with a collection is if there are a lot of heterogenous objects in the collection.

There are limited situations where storing different object types in the same collection makes sense. Most of the time, however, this is a sign of either lazy development or not understanding the collection mechanism very well.

It’s generally a good idea to only put one type of object into a collection. This makes it much easier to work with and avoids any need for instanceof checks. By “one type of object”, I don’t mean that all of the objects need to be the exact same class. Chances are good that all of the objects being placed into a collection have some relationship; perhaps they will all implement the same interface.

I may have completely misinterpreted the interviewer, but I have a very strong impression that he and perhaps others on his team are used to using collections as grab bags of widely different things. Personally, I wouldn’t want to maintain that code. I can hope that the addition of generics to Java has forced the interviewer to change at least one practice for the better. I’m glad I wasn’t called in for the job – who knows how many more “well, at least it works” practices are being followed? I’ve got enough of those at my current job; I don’t need to learn a new set.

Images:

Tin Can:

Java Code:

The general consensus put forth by Twitterers with “eco” or “green” in their usernames is 2,500 gallons of water to 1 pound of beef.

This tweet, for example, was posted on April 1 and links to a Yahoo! Answers discussion.

This tweet, from June 7, links to this article from EarthSave International.

Both of the aforementioned tweets use the 2,500 gallons per 1 pound of beef figure. What’s not so clear is how the number was determined in each case.

The Yahoo! Answers discussion arrives at the number from a YouTube video titled You can’t be a meat eating environmentalist by a user named “LiveVegan”. In the course of this video, text is shown on the screen, citing various “facts” about the livestock industry. One of the facts is the 2,500 gallons of water statement. The video does not state where this number came from, nor does it cite any of its sources in any more detail than “2006 United Nations Report & WoodstockFAS.org”.

The EarthSave link similarly comes up with the 2,500 gallon number, based on a couple of sources. The first source is “a statement by the renowned scientist Dr. Georg Borgstrom at the 1981 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science”. The next is the book Population, Resources, Environment, apparently published in 1978 and not easily obtained (at least for me). The last source cited is a publication titled Water Inputs in California Food Production, that is described as distributed by the Water Education Foundation. I visited the Water Education Foundation’s website at http://www.watereducation.org/, but was unable to find this publication.

What do we have so far from Twitterers to support the 2,500 gallons per pound of beef claim? One YouTube video published by a person who could certainly be seen as having a biased opinion, and an article published at an indeterminate date quoting a statement, a 30-year old book, and an article that can’t be found.

I was raised on a cattle ranch, the same one that my father and grandfather were raised on. It’s probably fair to say that I have a biased opinion of the agriculture industry as well. I can’t, however, just deny the water for beef argument because I don’t like the numbers. I did some research of my own and found startlingly different results.

This article, from a website created by the Cattlemen’s Beef Board and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, gives a number of 435 gallons per pound of beef. This number is backed first by Animal Agriculture and Global Food Supply, from the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology (CAST). The report is quite exhaustive and places doubt on the larger estimates of water usage due to overestimating the amount of irrigation used in growing the feed.

Both the website and the CAST article reference Estimation of the water requirement for beef production in the United States. This publication delves into great detail about the amount of water used to grow various feed crops, as well as the amount of water used for finishing slaughtered animals. The results of this study were that it takes approximately 441 gallons of water per pound of beef. Additionally, this article points out that livestock production is responsible for just over 11% of all U.S. water use.

Sure, it’s easy to take the outrageous numbers as facts and pass them along, especially when you’re anti-beef. The livestock industry as a whole seems to be a convenient target for environmentalist outcry lately, but I would urge people to keep in mind that “livestock” also includes pork and poultry. Pork and poultry deserve additional scrutiny due to the conditions that the animals are raised under.

I’ve only been arguing the claims that beef requires a large amount of water. There are similar claims regarding the amount of grain it takes to produce a pound of meat. I could probably fill another blog post with this debate, but I can summarize quickly. It takes 2.6 pounds of grain, not 16, to produce a pound of beef. Similarly, a significant amount of cattle feed is not food-grade, meaning it’s inedible for humans.

Sources:

How much food energy is lost by consuming meat instead of vegetables?
Yahoo! Answers, ~October 2008

2,500 Gallons All Wet? – John Robbins
EarthSave International, Date Unknown

You can’t be a meat eating environmentalist – “LiveVegan”
YouTube UK, 15 May 2007

Water Education Foundation

Beef Myths and Facts
Beef from Pasture to Plate, Date Unknown

Animal Agriculture and Global Food Supply
Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, July 1999
Available from http://www.cast-science.org/

Estimation of the water requirement for beef production in the United States – J.L. Beckett and J.W. Oltjen
Journal of Animal Science, 1993
Available from http://jas.fass.org

The one thing that makes this man stand out in my memory is that whenever we parted ways, he would say “make it a good day”. I usually said “you, too”, or something similarly uninspired.

What he was saying finally struck me one day. He was not telling me to have a good day. He was telling me to make it a good day.

As nice as the sentiment sounded, I didn’t really see how it applied to me. My job sucked, and it was causing me all kinds of stress – even to the point of visiting the emergency room. I experienced a lot of anxiety and had a few panic attacks.

I got to the point where I reacted badly to everything that happened at work. I can remember telling my manager more than once that decisions made by upper management were going to cause me to have to take another trip to the hospital. He finally got tired of my complaining and told me that work was not causing me stress; it was my reaction to work that was causing stress. That was not the answer I was looking for, so I added him to my mental list of stressors.

Fast forward a couple of years to a new job. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m now leading a pilot project using an agile process (Scrum). For the first several iterations everything annoyed me. My developers couldn’t follow simple instructions. They couldn’t write good code. They had to be constantly prodded to keep them going. Every day had its share of “what now?” moments.

For some reason I started thinking about the man at the gym again. This time, it paired perfectly with my old manager’s advice. Despite my annoyances, work continued to get done and things were working. It wasn’t the work that was bothering me. It was my reaction to work.

I’ve been trying to be very mindful of how I’m reacting to things at work. I still get pulled in a lot of different directions, and I’m still having trouble getting my team involved in the process. What I’m not doing is worrying about it. I’m learning to be more aggressive about my time management. Instead of wondering why my team can’t grasp simple process concepts, I’m asking them how I can explain or demonstrate it better.

Don’t get me wrong. There are a million things I’d like to change about my environment and my team every day, but instead of waiting for a good day to just “happen” to me, I’m becoming an active participant and “making it a good day”.

In the last several weeks, I’ve noticed that my anxiety level has plummeted, my stomach is not upset every day, and I’m sleeping better. That’s good enough for me.