I love the way Microsoftees label themselves with pretentious titles
almost as if they really meant something, so up in Redmond you get
truckloads of dorks fresh out of Bob Jones College with half-assed
degrees thinking they are "Senior Engineers". I guess that in such a
closed world where everybody pays lip-service to such idiocy, it's
fairly easy to get out of touch with reality.
>>[yadda yadda yadda]
>> Job requirements are: excellent knowledge of C/C++, experience in
>>using Win-32 APIs for GUI design/implementation, knowledge of
>>performance optimization, and basic understanding of a multi-threaded
>>operating system dynamics. [...]
It would be fun to see a little academic peer-review bring them down
to earth, but there's no chance of that, witness:
http://www.microsoft.com:80/win32dev/base/locktest.htm
It's about "Compound Win32 Synchronization Objects". The author
yammers on in a somewhat friendly tone and even claims:
"The correctness of the implementations will be shown in a future article."
That would be rather difficult since the implementation is incorrect.
About group locks he:
"looked into several solutions and liked the following one best; it
is fairly small and intuitive".
It also fails due to a race condition. He is glad to notice that:
"of 200 loops, each thread found itself in only 2 loops where
threads of other groups had claimed the lock already."
Cool, a bug that only shows up 1% of the time. Ship it. By the time
the customer notices the deadlock, we'll already have his money.
How can someone fuck up like this, keep a straight face and put the
code on the Web for developers' consumption? In academia it would be
thrown out with a "firm reject" or even a "you must be joking".
The wanker (probably a "senior engineer" with "excellent knowledge of C,
Win32 and multi-threading") then has gall to say:
"The moral of the story: The problems with synchronization may be so
subtle that they may slip by even somebody with a very strong
background and profound knowledge of synchronization."
The moral of the story is that incompetent morons in Redmond have
their smug heads so far up each others asses that they don't even
realise most of them aren't competent to code a damn thing.
>Anyone want a job with Microsoft?
Hey, if you want to help us make mucho $$$, just leave your conscience
at the door and come on in.
-- Rob.