The user is probably a transmission level grid operator. These exist at most decent sized utilities (Entergy, AEP, Duke), although it is possible there is a TOP (transmission operator company) that is not the same as the utility.
There are also organizations like the RTO/ISO that also act like air traffic controllers for the grid by keeping it reliable. They also are usually responsible for committing and dispatching generation for dozens of utilities collectively to save money (by banding together, you need to carry less reserves or backup power and can leverage economies of scale). In North America these organizations are (CAISO, SPP, ERCOT, MISO, PJM, NYISO, and ISO-NE). All of these organizations practice black-start drills (I used to help run them) and have NERC certified operators.
If he's doing grid protection he's probably in distribution engineering and they would be pretty involved with a black start drill from as in they or the line crews with their boots on the ground as not all of that procedure can be initiated remotely I'd imagine.
The transmission level engineers and operators will call the shots as far as how the high level stuff goes down. In other words they'll issue a directive to get unit x online and then close in breaker b and clear a path to unit y while picking up load at z. The actual process from the end of the people doing that work is likely to be significantly more detailed.
"If he's doing grid protection he's probably in distribution engineering and they would be pretty involved with a black start drill from as in they or the line crews with their boots on the ground as not all of that procedure can be initiated remotely I'd imagine."
Honestly, I know that entire procedure myself as it's listed on a few different sites, one being the wikipedia blackout article. Then again this kind of stuff interests me so I read up on it.
I'm not sure you fully understand, or maybe it's me that misunderstands what you're saying :)
Each utility generally has its own black-start procedures. One utility might start two diesel generators (only really used for black-start) and then slowly start energizing the path to various loads and other generators. That utility and it's parent RTO/ISO train on that scenario several times a year and have the procedure printed in a binder within reach.
Something I've found interesting is that many of these plans are ~35 years old and we're created before computers were super common place for these kinds of things. The point being people weren't doing graph and optimization algorithms to determine the optimal paths. There has been a little university research and national lab research into this recently and I've heard they've helped certain utilities that they worked with determine some improvements, which is always exciting.
Can confirm. This is one of THE best references out there for explaining a lot of key power systems topics. I didn't think it was publically available though?
Not sure I follow - I think you're saying the way the patent is worded means the game dev is protected, but if there was no patent at all there would be nothing to attack them with in the first place?
As someone else who have hired developers I agree with the parent post here.
Examples include:
- totally oblivious to standard library for the language/frameworks, reimplementing the most basic things (poorly)
- even after a 3 year CS
education, lacks basic understanding of object-oriented programming/class hierarchies
- has trouble implementing even simple if/else-conditions without help
I’m talking really basic stuff here. You’d be surprised. I assume that if you are self-taught, you have the interest and because of that already much more knowledge than many graduates.
The if/else part is really astonishing. The other ones I can understand in SOME way but the if/else is logic that's used in every day life. If I do this then that will happen, otherwise this other thing may happen. Very surprising.
We have a pre-interview test that is basically "use flickr's api to show some pictures", with a few details about how the pictures are sized and arranged. Applicants that have gone to bootcamps and even college frequently fail this miserably. Many of the rest fail to understand the details. We even had one use a completely different end point than the one specified by URL to the documentation. Some have just given up and turned nothing in, or something that they admitted didn't work.
These are candidates that we liked their resume enough to give them a shot, not just anyone who applied.
If you have only one or two positions open, have no trouble finding applicants, why not give a test that has a 5% pass rate if that means you end up with 6 people to choose from and still have to turn people away? What would the advantage be of making it easier just so you would have to review and turn even more people away?
We aren't looking for someone that has to be told repeatedly to read the entire ticket and actually do everything in it. We're looking for detail-oriented people.
And we find them. It's so much easier to work with them.
that's a super regular bar that anyone who's moderately able to program or learn new things should be able to jump over easily. details are important in a technical field.
For me it would be lack of intuition / imagination for building software.
Some people just cannot come up with a high level idea of a solution. Many of them immediately jumps into code, even worse so it's usually some UI code.
If there are engineers you highly respect on your team, their code is a great place to start.
Otherwise, many top tech companies now open source software that they've written internally, oftentimes with their own websites. And there is also a growing trend for them to actually maintain the software they open source as opposed to just throwing it over the fence.
Think of companies that have a strong engineering brand, and then just search for what open source software they're released. Pick whatever seems most aligned with your interests.
Peter Norvig has lots of expository code that embodies lots of good design.
I find I like to learn the flavor of different kinds of code, but practical codebases have so much stuff going on that it's not easy to find the distinctive part. It would be great to see more people do expository versions of familiar software and libraries.
Reading code is the equivalent of looking at solutions for math problems... is it more helpful reading the solutions without context or with? You need to see the original problem, and how the solution came about in response to that problem. In regard to this, I would say, pick a problem that has a solution (walkthrough, if possible) available and then attempt to solve it and then honestly check your solution against the given solution.
Casinos & arcades sort of solve this problem. You walk & buy tokens, then use these tokens to spend, which can then be cashed back out when you're done. Also credit card transactions can be reversed up to months later, so in the grand scheme of things 10 minutes is not so bad, if big retail outlets wanted to make it work they could.
Except the majority of customers don't want to pre-purchase gift cards to shop at a retailer, but instead want to spend as soon as they make the decision to purchase.
Likewise, the frequency of chargebacks is so low it doesn't justify waiting up to 10 minutes to buy something for every purchase.
If both the shopper & retail store are using the same BTC exchange, or exchanges that trust each other, the exchange can just move the coins internally, which is instant. Retail outlets could also share information about scammers & create a blacklist of who not to trust, and then just accept the small amount of risk. Like you said, credit cards also have this problem but the frequency of chargebacks is low enough that retail stores do not require you to wait months before leaving the store with your goods. Even accepting cash entails the possibility of fraud. But these are good points you've made. I don't think demand is high enough that we'll see BTC go mainstream for retail, but if demand were to be high enough there are ways to make it work without waiting 10 minutes, but these would rely on exchanges & mutually trusted 3rd party agencies, which you could argue defeats the purpose of using BTC in the first place since its not decentralized but you'd still get the benefits of there being a fixed amount of BTC. People could also budget their monthly spending & transfer it ahead of time into an exchange. People already do this with checking/savings accounts, keeping some funds in checking for when they want to shop.
I read your entire paragraph and this just seems like a hammer looking for a nail. Credit cards automatically handle all of this (blacklisting, risk and fraud management, trustful 3rd party, etc.) so why would anyone want to use BTC for payments unless it's for things that CC companies won't touch (drugs, pirated software, etc.)?
You're right, that's why I said it probably won't happen, but if demand were high enough it could be made to work. One scenario that would increase demand would be inflation of the US dollar. Look at what happened in Zimbabwe. I'm not saying that's likely to happen, just playing devil's advocate.
