balloot

That interview question would be completely irrelevant for 99.9% of software jobs.

Nobody is denying that this stuff is essential for some very specialized software teams. But the claim that it's something every software engineer needs to know is utterly ridiculous.

It seems that every day on HN there is some post offering something "every programmer needs to know", yet the post is actually some very in-depth dive into the minutiae of the author's pet subject.

The other day there was some post on front end/client side programming with a crazy amount of things everyone needs to know. Now apparently we also have to know the characteristics of the charging/discharging of capacitors in memory.

All in all, this is WAY too in depth too have the title it has. The only way you have to know all this stuff as a software engineer is if you are working on the lowest level of something like an OS kernel or a video game engine.

That is also crazy wrong.

Google and Facebook, between them, employ somewhere in the range of 15,000-20,000 engineers. Look at the entirety of the two companies' web presence (ie their jQuery hacker designed stuff) - that's work that could be done by a very small percentage of those 15,000 people.

The real challenge for both those companies is scalability and algorithmic complexity. They both do things like tweak well-established open source packages, implement machine learning, build programming languages/operating systems, influence technical web standards, etc. Stuff that decidedly is NOT the realm of your average hacker who decided to skip college because the curriculum wasn't "revelant".

If you don't believe me, feel free to try to get hired at either company without a college degree. Unless you've done something VERY notable, it's not gonna happen.

No, Google/Facebook can NOT get by with self-taught programmers. Much of what they do is the realm of highly educated people with a PhD or Masters in CS. Look at one of Google's highest visibility projects - the self driving car. I highly doubt you're going to find anyone associated with that project that doesn't have a degree, and rightly so. There's more to CS than making fun jQuery hacks.

Wow, are you wrong.

First off, at any decent school the CS curriculum focuses on theory and other things that are relatively slow changing. Big O theory, language parsing, etc are absolutely just as relevant now as they were 10 years ago.

Second, it is asinine to suggest that people with CS degrees don't get interesting jobs. In the end, people with good degrees just have access to a superset of the jobs available to someone who skipped school. Both can be hackers who make cool web apps, or iPhone apps, etc. But only one has the ability to go to Google or Facebook and work with machine learning algorithms. Or go to Apple and work on the iOS platform. Or go to Pixar and build the guts of their rendering engine. That's the value of a degree - there are a lot of really awesome jobs that are very likely out of reach for you having never gone to school for CS.

I just can't believe that this works as seamlessly as the handbook would have you believe. It seems it would create a very Lord Of The Flies/cliquey atmosphere. In a group of people, there always exists some kind of hierarchy, whether it's explicit or implied. In this case, there is zero attempt to create an explicit power structure, so it's 100% implied, but I don't see why that's fundamentally better.

In general this sounds like the natural structure for pack animals, where you join a pack and no one anoints a power structure, but it becomes clear very quickly who is "alpha", "beta", etc. IMHO it sounds like it possibly could be a very stressful situation.

To be fair, they also have the opposite quality wherein one great person can positively affect an entire tree. Many great companies have been built by a great leader positively affecting hundreds or thousands of people.

Well, I can imagine there's a lot of web designers who would love to take a shot at working on the physics engine for the next Portal game. Or play testers that would rather be actually doing development on the games. It would be interesting to see how people are cajoled into doing "lesser" jobs.

No, this is not arguing semantics. A contract programmer and a technical co-founder are two totally different things.

Anyone else notice that there have been exactly zero specific cases of an employer asking for a FB password? It seems that "Employers ask for FB passwords!" is more of an outrage tool than an actual issue.

For those who watch TDS/Colbert, they poke fun from time to time at Fox News et al for making up scary things that kids supposedly do - the latest was soaking tampons with vodka and sticking them up your butt. This feels like the "soaking tampons with vodka" of the professional world. Someone probably has done it, but it is really uncommon and not worth losing sleep over.

That's about right. Without teams/scores/standings an ESPN API is useless. Fail.

The spin in the article was that this was just a routine culling of the employee base.

And to be fair, an ideally managed company would actually have this happen every once in a while. A company like Blizz that has no problems hiring really should drop the bottom 10% of employees periodically and find replacements if needed. I doubt that's the real motivator here, but cutting 10% of employees isn't a bad thing at all as long as the people were picked properly.

I assume that if Blizz kept 90% of its employees it likely kept most or all of the employees that would otherwise do kickass startups. If it didn't, then there is something very wrong with its layoff process!

An increment/decrement operator is unary and doesn't give you the ability to change the value by any more than one.

This feels like it was written by a guy who wrote a popular OS and has had people kissing his ass for 15 years. Basically the coding version of a diva musician.

It's not this one post - if you read HN regularly you get a weekly dose of "We're 37 Signals! Check out how awesome we are!". It's obnoxious.

Find them totally arrogant as well. Everything corporate strategy they employ is the "right" way of doing things and necessitates a self-fellating post on Hacker News.

I don't think it's subtle at all. My primary knowledge of 37signals is as the company that spends an inordinate amount of time on Hacker News telling everyone how great it and its methods are.

Bah. Looks like the server is now not responding. Bummer, because this is really fun.

So you're saying that he would be a better prospective employee if he spent less time working on his primary job and instead spent more time writing other code? That seems totally counterintuitive to me.

So what happens if someone is employed? Do you just not hire them? Do you expect your employees to spend lots of time coding random stuff outside of work? That's not generally a quality I would put a lot of weight on.

This is exactly why Github will not ever be the standard. It's fine to show off what you play around with in your spare time, but the very best and most productive workers actually won't have an extensive up-to-date Github repo. This is because they're been gainfully employed and have spent the vast majority of their coding time kicking ass at their real job.

In short, while people with impressive Github contributions can generally be good employees (but not always!), many good employees simply don't have time or interest for open source / side projects.

The article is only looking at the relationship in one direction. It's not entirely that learning clojure makes you money, it's that high level academic types that are predisposed to high wage jobs are more likely to know clojure. I would actually argue that this is the far more significant causation relationship. But what do I know - I don't know clojure. :)

Exactly my experience.

My attempt at feedback: If you are trying to promote a game you made, promote the game. I have no clue why there are all these pictures of you with random girls, but I can tell you that it lost my interest far before I ever read a word about your game.

That's a great article. The same situation has developed here in San Francisco, where the magnet public high school that admits based solely on test scores is Asian by a large majority.

The problem is, in the drive to get perfect grades and test scores, the drive for knowledge and life skills is lost somewhere along the way. And in the end, many asian students simply never get the skills needed to actually create things or execute at a job that doesn't have very rigid guidelines.

I think the larger picture issue is optimizing for grades and tests does not optimize for achieving in the real world. And elite colleges in the US have acknowleged that, and brought in the use of subjective factors. And while that may be an imperfect system, it is less imperfect than choosing solely on scores and grades.

I would be interested to see their definition of "all other credentials equal". My assumption is that it is some very simplistic compilation of grades and test scores, because the article barely mentions any factors other than these. Also, many of the things that drive college admission are not easy to objectively compare - is a great cellist equal to an 3 sport letterman who was also on student council? How does a rich kid whose parents send him to math camp compare to a kid who had to work full time during the summer? And so on.

This article fails to mention that college admission is not based solely on test scores. Many Asians are almost solely test-driven and tend to ignore the other aspects of a "well-rounded" eduction.

I am sure if you looked at race-based stats on who played sports in high school (as opposed to test scores like in the article), you would see that Asians are way behind in that particular metric.

And while some may not think sports matter, colleges do. And it appears that there is good reason for this, as sports teach leadership, teamwork, how to perform under pressure, etc.

I would hope this lawsuit is thrown out, as this country really should not be encouraging "tiger mom" behavior as the right thing to do. Instead, if you want your son to get into Harvard, stop making him study 15 hours a day and get him into extracurricular activities.

Same deal as the other post. The easy part of creating a declarative language is describing it. The hard part is actually implementing it.

I have a feeling the second question will stay open. :)