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Comment by thefz | Hacker News Reader

> They have the highest leetcode standards out of FAANG. As does Snap. They hire people that basically memorized computer science algorithms. And so their employees are bookish, not innovative people. Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon do not have the same issues with creating new products.

I don't think this is necessarily true because the people designing products are not the same people creating/implementing them. Even the most innovative company of the planet has some programmers and sysadmins doing "bookish" jobs as you say.

Don't fall in the trap of thinking a smart and well trained tech can't be creative; there's some code out there that is a work of art and can inspire awe in everyone. Don't think that if their work is not evident or easy to comprehend it is not creative.

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Commented this elsewhere:

Theres a difference between creating beautiful creative code and creating an innovative product that people want to use. Its a different type of intelligence, and why you dont see Math professors starting ecommerce/product/clothing businesses. The classic dichotomy between steve jobs and wozniak.

I have worked at a few big tech companies, I have regularly seen engineers drive huge innovation in how something is done. Product people cant always do that, they dont have enough understanding of large scale systems.

You don't see math professors doing startups because they have tenure and are financially risk-averse. They also simply like being professors.

There may be another factor - universities are dominated by anti-capitalist sentiment. Doing a business startup means exiting that belief system.

Admittedly I'm over a decade out of university so things might have changed, but when I was getting my masters in mathematics several of the math professors had various 'side hustles' doing cool and advanced stuff at startups and in industry or finance.

universities are dominated by anti-capitalist sentiment

I know this is trendy to say and I'm sure there are individual universities where it is true, but I see little evidence for it at large. If nothing else every hedge fund and investment bank in the world basically only hire university graduates, and they can hardly be accused of being anti-capitalist. Every economics course I ever took was based, almost axiomatically, on the premise that capitalism is awesome.

University graduates are not the same as professors.

The econ class I took at Caltech was taught by an award-winning leftist anti-capitalist professor, and if you didn't regurgitate his ideology on the tests, you got a bad grade.

Hedge funds only hire a particular subset of graduates. A lot of left-wingers set aside their ideology to get those high salaries.

My father was a finance professor at two colleges. He was the only faculty member who believed in free markets. He was constantly challenged in this by students and faculty. One time the faculty even challenged him to an open debate - the faculty against him. He took them apart. Faculty and students came up to him later saying they had no idea there was even a case for the free market, and thanked him for opening their eyes.

I wonder where you suppose Sanders' constituency comes from?

>there's some code out there that is a work of art and can inspire awe in everyone.

and the people who wrote it didn't spend thousands of hours memorizing the same stupid leetcode exercises to pass lame interviews for 6 figures job, they worked on real projects

tell me the fast inverse square root from Carmack would have been praised in an interview...

Perhaps if you spent more time with books, you'd know that John Carmack didn't invent the fast inverse square root algorithm associated with his name.

I found out about this after writing this comment, didn't bother to edit it(because what's the point?)

Who cares if it's carmack or buddha?

it's still brilliant code written by creative people, who can do stuff beyond memory copy/pasting code from other people

Would that improve the products the GP worked on?

Ironically Carmack is just one of those technical minded people who also has been hella creative... Fo 30 years

bless his comment in code for a magic number in >Q3 engine< I think?

// don't change this number, not sure why it works...

not an exact quote but something like that

Love that, I have also written a pretty much identical comment in the past lol

Disagree with the thousands of hours. The tasks are actually pretty easy and take about maybe 5 hours for any competent coder to brush up on.

But that's the problem. If a few hours of exercise can dramatically change someone's results then it's not an acid test and it speaks poorly to the quality of whatever team the candidate would be joining.

All interviews are two way streets and the problem is everyone knows what kind of results pass through the leet code filter and so if it's a bad process, perhaps your best candidates will decline to proceed or accept.

You want people whose time is more valuable than your money. That's kinda the whole point of employee/employer social arrangements.

Leetcode isn't an alternative to real world projects, it's an alternative to textbooks and lectures for beginners.

Zuckerberg was able to build Facebook because he got a good education and understood graph theory enough to apply it to social networks.

In the past, the only people who really understood concepts like graphs were people who endured rigorous four-year computer science curriculums. And only top students at elite schools would learn this. The average CS graduate has a very poor understanding of fundamental data structures and algorithms.

But with Leetcode, anyone can solve 5-10 graph problems and obtain the same knowledge. It's extremely efficient. In a couple of days, you can learn what used to take years.

> understood graph theory enough to apply it to social networks.

Facebook accounts have a friends list. Why would you need to understand graph theory.

Zuckerburg stole the idea of the product and knew php. I don’t think he needed graph theory to build it and his education was really only Exeter at that point.

Don’t fall in the trap of thinking creativity nescessarily applies accross borders.

Being creative with coding is not the same as being creative with painting or inventing new products.

Of course smart and well trained techs can be creative, it just may not apply as well to creating new products line other types of creative minds.

I disagree. Creativity != art.

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