4 ms·

If it's a new concept then the entropy is huge for anyone regardless of background.

chrisseaton 11y ago
Do you really think any random programmer can master any given field of computer science in just a few months of starting a job? You could take a compiler engineer and get them doing cryptography, or a cryptographer and get them to write a compiler? No need for any experience to work in either of those fields? Just some JS or Android experience would be fine and you can use Stack Overflow to work out the rest of the details?
- AznHisoka 11y ago
  Agreed. I think OP's advice only applies to programming languages, and frameworks. But not concepts like machine learning, cryptography, compilers, algorithm design, distributed systems, etc. For those, actual experience does matter.
AznHisoka 11y ago
That's not correct. Who do you think would be able to implement a spam machine learning algorithm in a month? A NLP PhD or a regular Android developer?
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  Given a whole month? Anyone who can use google and isn't afraid to experiment with the available libraries they find.
  - chrisseaton 11y ago
    Would you trust your security to a TLS implementation done by someone who'd spent a month googling on it?
    - lordnacho 11y ago
      What if they spent the month finding out how some open source implementation worked, including what experts thought of it, and wired it up for your needs?
      - chrisseaton 11y ago
        You know, at the bottom of your stack someone, somewhere, needs to know a subject well enough to implement things from scratch. If what you are doing hasn't been done before you can't just google or find an open source library. Even if it has been done before often these things are often barely written down. Do you think when Google decided to create the V8 JavaScript JIT they hired a couple of Django programmers and asked them to google 'how to write a JIT'? Or do you think they specified a certain level of experience in writing JITs on the job advert?
        lordnacho 11y ago
        > You know, at the bottom of your stack someone, somewhere, needs to know a subject well enough to implement things from scratch. If what you are doing hasn't been done before you can't just google or find an open source library. That really depends on what "from scratch" means. Any particular piece of code can be examined in enough detail that nobody in the whole world would understand all of them. Luckily people who understand specific pieces will produce a part for others to use. Often the only thing that hasn't been done before is one particular mashup of existing parts. Then the skill of coding is like the skill of cooking: using judgement to assemble well known parts into a new whole. > Do you think when Google decided to create the V8 JavaScript JIT they hired a couple of Django programmers and asked them to google 'how to write a JIT'? Or do you think they specified a certain level of experience in writing JITs on the job advert? That wasn't the point. I'm not saying that any programmer can do any programming job. But that the selection criterion (language, framework) is in general wrong. If you have a guy who did a JIT for Java, do you disqualify that guy from a JIT for Go job? I don't think so.
      - limeyx 11y ago
        Still no. Security is hard. Harder than most other stuff
- ThrustVectoring 11y ago
  You don't need someone to implement the algorithm, you generally need someone to wire together APIs between your application and machine learning libraries. I'd rather take someone who's been hacking around on Django for a year than a freshly minted NLP PhD for adding spam-detection for messages inside a Django app.

Do you really think any random programmer can master any given field of computer science in just a few months of starting a job? You could take a compiler engineer and get them doing cryptography, or a cryptographer and get them to write a compiler? No need for any experience to work in either of those fields? Just some JS or Android experience would be fine and you can use Stack Overflow to work out the rest of the details?

AznHisoka 11y ago
Agreed. I think OP's advice only applies to programming languages, and frameworks. But not concepts like machine learning, cryptography, compilers, algorithm design, distributed systems, etc. For those, actual experience does matter.

AznHisoka 11y ago

That's not correct. Who do you think would be able to implement a spam machine learning algorithm in a month? A NLP PhD or a regular Android developer?

tbrownaw 11y ago
Given a whole month? Anyone who can use google and isn't afraid to experiment with the available libraries they find.
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  Would you trust your security to a TLS implementation done by someone who'd spent a month googling on it?
  - lordnacho 11y ago
    What if they spent the month finding out how some open source implementation worked, including what experts thought of it, and wired it up for your needs?
    - chrisseaton 11y ago
      You know, at the bottom of your stack someone, somewhere, needs to know a subject well enough to implement things from scratch. If what you are doing hasn't been done before you can't just google or find an open source library. Even if it has been done before often these things are often barely written down. Do you think when Google decided to create the V8 JavaScript JIT they hired a couple of Django programmers and asked them to google 'how to write a JIT'? Or do you think they specified a certain level of experience in writing JITs on the job advert?
      - lordnacho 11y ago
        > You know, at the bottom of your stack someone, somewhere, needs to know a subject well enough to implement things from scratch. If what you are doing hasn't been done before you can't just google or find an open source library. That really depends on what "from scratch" means. Any particular piece of code can be examined in enough detail that nobody in the whole world would understand all of them. Luckily people who understand specific pieces will produce a part for others to use. Often the only thing that hasn't been done before is one particular mashup of existing parts. Then the skill of coding is like the skill of cooking: using judgement to assemble well known parts into a new whole. > Do you think when Google decided to create the V8 JavaScript JIT they hired a couple of Django programmers and asked them to google 'how to write a JIT'? Or do you think they specified a certain level of experience in writing JITs on the job advert? That wasn't the point. I'm not saying that any programmer can do any programming job. But that the selection criterion (language, framework) is in general wrong. If you have a guy who did a JIT for Java, do you disqualify that guy from a JIT for Go job? I don't think so.
    - limeyx 11y ago
      Still no. Security is hard. Harder than most other stuff
ThrustVectoring 11y ago
You don't need someone to implement the algorithm, you generally need someone to wire together APIs between your application and machine learning libraries. I'd rather take someone who's been hacking around on Django for a year than a freshly minted NLP PhD for adding spam-detection for messages inside a Django app.