Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marginalia_nu | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

There is no team. I did these things alone, for fun.

If you doubt me, ask me any question about them, any implementation detail, I can explain it to you. I can discuss parsers, stack frame optimization and calling conventions for days, weird edge cases in the C syntax, trigraphs, whatever; I can tell you not only how to implement a search engine index in minute detail, methods for compressing a lexicon, but how to implement a crawler, how to extract keywords from a website, how to identify the language of a website, we can discuss ranking algorithms, we can discuss absurd number of different ways a web server may tell you which character encoding a page has, I can tell you why some websites have the DTD "-//SoftQuad Software//DTD HoTMetaL PRO 6.0::19990601::extensions to HTML 4.0//EN", we can discuss the absurdly inconsistent usage of the lang tag, we can talk about how sequential writes sometimes are still faster on SSDs, we can talk about how to make a SQL query perform well on a table with half a billion rows, we can talk about blackhat SEO, we can talk about how to implement a hash table on disk and when that is and isn't a good idea, we can discuss B-trees.

I also have the finished product to show. It's not open source, but if all this fails to convince you, I can bring my laptop and we can walk through the actual code.

If all of this is bullshit, I'm the greatest bullshit-artist alive, and you can just put me in sales instead.

Sounds like a proper egomaniac and possible bullshit-artist. The remaining question is, how do you react if you are hired and asked to do something below your level?

I do work on all levels, that's the nature of working independently on large projects. If all the work you have is below my level, though, then clearly I'm not a good fit for the role and the role is also not a good fit for me.

I agree that refusing to write a trivial program at an interview is the best way to prove that you are a cooperative person and ready work at all levels.

If you want a guy to teach to jump through hoops on command, to bark and roll over, then I'm just not a good candidate for the job. You have failed my interview as much as I have failed yours at that point.

Look, I have been doing this for longer than some junior developers have been alive, and I have more than enough financial stability to be able to turn down offers. When I look for a job, I'm not looking for a way to pay the next month's bills or a means to get rich, I'm looking for somewhere I can make a meaningful difference.

You're not really convincing me, but I have been doing this for some time too. There have been a bit too many times when someone has been "working independently on large project" that turned out to be a total dumpster fire and I have had to clean up the mess. The hero programmers behind these projects all thought they were making a meaningful difference.

Exactly! This is the meat of it. If anyone wants to talk about what I have written, we can look at and run it together. It's all available to look at, discuss, and actually use. Isn't that more important than anything I could tell you with a test? Arguably, looking at my existing products, in depth, is the best possible interview.

I would feel uncomfortable enough about being shown proprietary code that I would end the interview right there. Not worth the legal risk.

Well I mean it's my IP so I can open source the particular file if it makes you feel more comfortable. It's not closed source because it's secret, but because it's harmful in the wrong hands.

Web crawlers are harmful to independent web crawling. It can be very annoying for webmasters when misconfigured, and abuse leads to honest crawlers encountering obstacles. It would probably spell the end of independent web crawling if every tom, dick and harry with a few spare raspberry pis set up their own search engine operation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com