Honestly, I had things like WiX and CMake in my mind when responding to you, but the tweet you linked to seems pretty fair too.
So many "nerdy" circles seem to be plagued by this subculture where your competence or intelligence is measured by how much obscure and useless knowledge you can accrue.
The fact that Max's experience creating and maintaining the single best package manager on macOS (by a country mile, too) was considered less important than whether or not he knew the minutiae of a particular form of logic puzzle is bullshit, and I can completely synpathise him in that regard.
I actually do think you have a point about the fetishization of trivia knowledge in this field. It's really not ideal, and I think it's more driven by social dysfunction or over-compensation for various kinds of imposter syndrome.
But that is not this. In the case of inverting a binary tree, what you call logic-puzzle minutiae is just taking a fundamental building block in computer science (binary trees) and asking the person to demonstrate even the faintest ability when it comes to writing an incredibly basic algorithm. Max Howell not only can't do it, but he doesn't even see why he should need to know how to do it!
That kind of proud ignorance is what grinds my gears. I'm sure someone can gather requirements and deliver value to customers and fix bugs and string together code and everything without knowing how to work with trees, but I don't really care. If they've somehow gotten that far without even a glimmer of curiosity about the fundamentals of computer science then something is disturbingly wrong, and I would worry about what other mammoth blind spots they inexplicably have.
Notably, he wasn't actually asked to invert a binary tree in the interview (this would not be a desirable question internally for anything other than screens) and he wasn't told why he failed the interview process. So given the response, I'm not certain that it wasn't his attitude during the interview process that sunk him.
It's hard to tell whether your comment was sarcastic or serious, but the guy invented homebrew, and was passed over for as you say, not knowing fundamental things. I'd flip the script in this narrative: by passing over the author of a wildly popular piece of software, the interviewers showed their missing knowledge of fundamental things - like good business sense. No thanks, Google.
And what does Google invent, anyway, given that their biggest financial successes have been acquisitions?
AussieWog93|4 years ago
So many "nerdy" circles seem to be plagued by this subculture where your competence or intelligence is measured by how much obscure and useless knowledge you can accrue.
The fact that Max's experience creating and maintaining the single best package manager on macOS (by a country mile, too) was considered less important than whether or not he knew the minutiae of a particular form of logic puzzle is bullshit, and I can completely synpathise him in that regard.
lordlic|4 years ago
But that is not this. In the case of inverting a binary tree, what you call logic-puzzle minutiae is just taking a fundamental building block in computer science (binary trees) and asking the person to demonstrate even the faintest ability when it comes to writing an incredibly basic algorithm. Max Howell not only can't do it, but he doesn't even see why he should need to know how to do it!
That kind of proud ignorance is what grinds my gears. I'm sure someone can gather requirements and deliver value to customers and fix bugs and string together code and everything without knowing how to work with trees, but I don't really care. If they've somehow gotten that far without even a glimmer of curiosity about the fundamentals of computer science then something is disturbingly wrong, and I would worry about what other mammoth blind spots they inexplicably have.
UncleMeat|4 years ago
mancerayder|4 years ago
And what does Google invent, anyway, given that their biggest financial successes have been acquisitions?
XorNot|4 years ago
I'm sure someone knows. I'm also sure that I don't care: why didn't they use the standard library function for it?
lordlic|4 years ago