A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
on a job interview in IT, an interviewer asked me if I understood the difference between TCP and UDP. After giving the best technical explanation I could, I ended with
I could tell you a UDP joke, but I'm not sure if you'd get it.
He said go ahead
I paused, that was it.
Kind of awkward.
I didn't get the job.
Nothing boosts your impression on people like making them feel stupid. RIP
I wouldn't expect this joke to make someone feel stupid if they know what UDP is, so it feels like it was a safe bet
Interviewing is (ideally) quite a structured type of conversation, when is a job interview. A lot of people have to lock in pretty hard to deal with how unnatural it is, and they might not have the spare bandwidth to catch a joke.
Especially not someone from HR, they're fucking troglodytes.
I completely agree with your first paragraph.
But TheFogan was probably not explaining UDP to an HR person in this scenario.
Oh I've seen some pretty bad interviewing, where HR is sent in with a question sheet and a box to tick for which key words the interviewee mentioned per question.
Obviously a red flag and useless method of interviewing, but it does happen frighteningly often. Especially where the IT team is so understaffed, they can't spare the time to do interviews.
This is done, especially in government work, to limit bias in the interview process. Ideally, though, the people conducting the interviews understand the questions they're asking and can use some judgement and give credit if someone explained a concept but didn't hit the specific keyword.
Yeah, but that’s not what this was.
Interviewer asked about thing then does not get joke about most basic property of thing. Either the interviewer is incredibly incompetent or incapable of getting a joke.
It’s a weird situation even for a job interview. (& I’ve been on job interviews that can only be described as tribunals with 8 judges grilling you simultaneously.)
I mean I think he got it after a few seconds, he did laugh, and then comment how everything was so serious before then and it took him a bit to get it. I don't think that was why I didn't get the job.
I will also tell you a joke about TCP, and if you don't get it, I will repeat.
This is fucking funny.
Unfortunately I don’t know enough about udp to get it, is it that you dumped the information before like, asking about it?
Tcp and udp are to sum it up, internet messaging protocols. UDP specifically is when you send a message over without guaranteeing your message was received. TCP on the otherhand is more like a handshake where you send a message and expect a response back.
The joke is basically UDP=I dont know if you would get it
Yeah I believe i remember roughly the explanation I gave to the interviewer.
TCP basically takes the time to confirm every detail actually was recieved, used in almost all situations in networking where accuracy is critical.
UDP is basically when speed is the more important than everything being perfect, (we were on a zoom call), Like say this video call, if the background gets blurry or a few frames drop or even my face distorts for a few seconds, that would be less of an inconvenience to us than if the network took the time and made sure to transmit every frame exactly as the camera picks it up, at the cost of an extra 10 seconds of lag in the call.
There's pretty basic UDP, that sends without confirming receiving. And instead of fixing it, they just slapped another protocol, TCP, on top of it.
With only UDP, you don't know, if you get it.
I asked someone this same question in an interview, not so much that it was important, but to see if they had general basic networking knowledge like they claimed to on their resume. Their highly confident explanation was "TCP is for sending, UDP is for receiving" They did not get the job, though not just because of that.
No one laughed, I'm too witty for this class.
Given how the cookie crumbles in plenty unis, odds are most of the class didn't even know about the experiments, so they didn't know enough to even notice the wit.
I would hope the professor would have at least chuckled.
Imagine he hears this joke everytime he makes the question...
He could have salivated a bit then.
Well, they are there to learn after all, he didn't assume his students knew, and asked if they did. One guy in the class knew. Seems like it's working itself out, and he just needs to keep that one loaded for later in the semester when people are primed to get it.
That's fair, you're right. I guess my comment was a bit too bitter.
I always expected people starting a uni course to at least know the very basics of the subject. You know, out of interest. For psychology it would be the basics of Freud (something dreams, id/ego/superego), Pavlov and Skinner (experiments with other animals, focus on behaviour instead of "mind"), Piaget (child development) etc.
But then your comment made me remember psychology classes are rather common for people from other graduations, specially when they'll become teachers or professors.
That joke deserved a laugh. The class clearly wasn’t conditioned properly.
it's worse if they then continue with. "ok, well, it's interesting you said that his name rings a bell because the experiment..." like you're too dumb to have even made the joke you did.
Maybe they just wanted to deny the positive feedback to him.
The only acceptable response is “I heard he was good at making bitches wet.”
Now I'm hungry
I just drooled all over myself and I have no idea why
I've heard that same joke a million times. It's what I'd expect to find at the top of a Reddit thread.
It's a witty joke but a common one, so wouldn't chuckle tbh
Should have accompanied the jokes with treats
The thing is it is highly doubtful that Pavlov ever used a bell. Also the experiments were no fun for the dogs.
He redirected the animals' digestive fluids outside the body, where they could be measured.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning#procedures
the experiments were no fun for the dogs
I would really expect most experiments to be no fun for animals that are experimented on
Since Pavlow is so famous you see often the dogs depicted as cute and someone ringing a bell. Not as fixated pepsin machines. At least in the past that was my mental image. Might be a me problem.
No, you're right about the images, it's marketing as usual, but I never thought about this
FWIW I used to hang out with behavioral psychology grad students, who were in the Skinnerian tradition of operant conditioning research. They mostly worked with pigeons, and to transport the birds they used juice pitchers with a few air holes cut into the bottom. I asked them once how they got the birds into the pitchers and they laughed and showed me: they would just open the bird's cage and hold the pitcher up and the birds would dive head-first into the pitcher, sometimes knocking themselves out in the process.
As part of the research protocol, the birds were kept on a diet that included about 80% of their normal caloric intake; the rest of their food was provided by the reinforcements of the experiments themselves (this was done to maximize the reinforcement effect of the rewards). So those birds were way the fuck into those experiments. To add to that, these students were all behavioral pharmacologists, so in addition to getting food reinforcement the birds were also getting drugs like cocaine and heroin.
BTW a lot of people confuse the operant conditioning research with the people who put animals into cages and shock them. This is definitely not what BF Skinner was all about. In fact he wrote books on the subject of how punishment is a bad thing for all animals (including humans and pigeons).
Or everyone has heard that same joke a thousand times already
Assuming they all don't have a very-literal-interpretation-of-jokes-leading-to-no-sense-of-humour, I think people usually laugh appreciatively at someone trying to lighten the mood in settings like this, even when they've heard the joke before.
For the life of me I can't remember how we got to the subject, but once we were talking about attaching speakers to a dog and I called it "Dolby Surround Hound." I was very proud of that one and it went completely unacknowledged.
Dogby.
I have no qualms stopping the conversation and repeating my joke. Witness my pun!!
good pun
I would have said "wasn't Pavlov the guy who had a dog named Ruby Begonia?" and even the prof wouldn't have known what the fuck I was talking about.
Should've started drooling right after.
I've found that everyone at uni is like this. Humourless ~~weirdos~~fellows, maybe they just exhaust themselves with drink, drugs and dancing every night and can't process my jokes.
what a bunch of drooling morons