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Comment by maqr | Hacker News Reader

Do you happen to know if the author went to college?

He seems to have this cute idea that you pay $120k to a institution of higher learning, then you dedicate all of your time to academics, then you emerge with a well-refined body of knowledge in your particular field. I thought this is how it worked too, before I attended a college.

Maybe his point is that you shouldn't be taken seriously if you pay $120k and spend 4 years doing something where you're not deeply intellectually invested, but it's hard to have the confidence at 17 to be the contrarian that doesn't attend college.

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Author went to college.

Look at his questions from another angle. Would you hire a CS grad who couldn't answer the question "What's your favorite programming language?"

I think his example might be overly specific, but the answers the candidate gave would certainly be a red flag.

Yes. But then, we use a gamified version of a work-sample test, so I would know that despite the fact that the candidate doesn't really care about the difference between Python and Ruby, he can exploit blind SQL injection and reverse engineer a network protocol. Which is good, because the latter ability is predictive of success, and the former is predictive of lots of stupid unproductive arguments.

This would be a nitpicking debate except that it gets to the heart of what makes the interview strategy in this article so dumb. There are lots of great programmers --- maybe some of the best --- who don't care all that much about language design or what language they'll be working in. There are, more importantly, a WHOLE MESS of programmers who can DEFINITELY talk your ears off about what the best language is... and then fail fizbuzz.

I wouldn't be interested in someone who has a "favourite programming language."

That's just asking for someone who thinks they're clever for figuring out how to drive screws with a hammer.

I would rather hire a CS grad who couldn't answer the question, "What's your favorite programming language?" than someone who could. A decent CS grad wouldn't have a preference, there are different languages for different purposes depending on what you are trying to accomplish. There is no one language fits all language. I'd prefer a CS grad who has a vested interest and appreciation of multiple languages, wouldn't you? Why hire someone with a raging hard on for Java when you can hire someone with an appreciation for Java, Python and C++?

I don't really know what my favorite programming language is, i'm currently most efficient in perl and java, but that doesn't mean that they're my favorites. I've not found "the language" yet.

I can't.

I'm always trying to choose between C++ and Lisp.

Disclaimer: I don't know Haskell or any other pure FP languages.

It depends if I'm hiring him to program or repair cars. If someone left college with a CS degree and a realization that he never wanted to write a line code ever again and got an apprenticeship as a welder instead, I wouldn't hold it against him if 6 years later he'd forgotten most of what he knew about programming.

So this candidate partied his way through college and bluffed his way to a degree, what difference does that make if you're not hiring him to do anything related to his degree? I thought the prevailing notion here was that most of the stuff taught at college was largely pointless when compared to the hard-won knowledge gained in the trenches of the professional world.

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