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Comment by sevensor | Hacker News Reader

Does disseminating information like this cause a net improvement in the workforce? Will people study high-productivity editors in the hope of getting hired, only to become better programmers despite themselves? Or will this result in people learning just enough of vim or emacs to use it badly in an interview?

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People who care enough to learn something because "higher paid or smarter people use it" are the very kind of people who are going to do better on interviews.

I've seen plenty of professors say they can tell (generally, that is a strong correlation) whether someone will succeed or fail using a single criteria. One example: When hearing a new word, does the student immediately look it up in a dictionary? That person will go far because they recognize and correct areas where they lack knowledge.

Mike Acton of Insomniac Games has one criteria. The only one he's seen actually result in long-term great employees: An insatiable desire to learn. When they hear something they don't know, they go home after work and begin reading. It's basically the same thing as the dictionary.

People who are willing to endure the onslaught that is vim or emacs, are willing to sit down and learn things that aren't easy. It doesn't make you a better programmer. It's just a hallmark of an already great programmer.

When he was a kid, Linus Torvolds used to write programs with a hex editor and directly writing the opcodes (instead of even using an assembler) into a file. That didn't make him a great programmer but the drive to do things like that when most would go "why bother", is what made him a great developer. It stands to reason that when presented with future obstacles, he applied the same gusto and problem solving skills instead of giving up.

> Or will this result in people learning just enough of vim or emacs to use it badly in an interview?

Hey, I use them badly in real life, too. No reason to make it sound so duplicitous.

No, I don't think it's going to cause an improvement -- we already see plenty of individual high-productivity Eclipse users and low-productivity Vim users.

I know many high productivity Vim, Emacs and IDE users - but in terms of low productivity people, IDEs definitely dominate.

Really, not a jab at anyone, just that Vim and Emacs are more advanced tools and it takes more advanced users to use them with any gain. More advanced users also use IDEs for some of their nicer tooling - personally I'd kill without Resharper at work.

I teach, there are plenty of incompitent students using vim (and other editors of course).

Anyone who makes hiring decisions predicated mostly on which editors the person uses is going to get what they deserve.

Just like in web development, do feature detection, don't sniff for things which might loosely correlate with what you actually care about.

surprised you are being downvoted - i totally agree with you - this data should be taken with a huge grain of salt and imo should be ignored for deciding on interview candidates and certainly ignored for hiring decisions.

While this data is fascinating, it does lead me to consider what other unknown factors are at play here influencing these results.

Gravitational readings that suggest the existence of a new planet are fascinating. Sentiment analysis that accurately predicts the outcome of a political race is fascinating. Loose correlations between passing arbitrary tests and the commands you type to edit text are interesting at best and even then as an exercise in what not to do.

That's what you got out of the article?

Obviously it's just highlighting a single interesting correlation.

Wow someone is going to learn an editor thinking it will help he/she interview better?

Create enough FUD around the technical interview and you'll always get people trying different things to improve their chances with these kinds of approaches.

I can't count how many people have assumed I'm good just because I can drop technical words intelligently into a conversation, so there's also going to be some lazy folks looking for vim/emacs usage and judging someone's abilities to be a bit higher because of that.

Technical interviews are just about knowing the right dance moves. If coding fizzbuzz in ruby using vim is more likely to get a good job than doing the same in perl using sublime I'm going to learn just enough ruby and vim to complete the interview. This is especially true when the company you are interviewing with posts a blog with their selection bias clearly spelled out.

I don't think anyone beliefs companies out there are interviewing for competency in legacy text editors.

VIM and Emacs both have commits to their codebases in the last 48 hours. Sublime released a new major version earlier this month. None of these can be considered legacy. This is an article about the correlation between these text editors and interviews.

Probably the latter.

It's a fun read :)

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