Oh, absolutely. I'm not questioning the author's decision to study rather than build something. The author's goal was to get a job, and he did the thing you do

Oh, absolutely. I'm not questioning the author's decision to study rather than build something. The author's goal was to get a job, and he did the thing you do if you want a job. I've worked as an SDE at Amazon; it was a good experience and I wish the author the best. I just don't believe that the whiteboarding the author did to get the job was a good predictor of engineering ability. I think the wrong actions are being perversely incentivized, and I think that makes us weaker and worse-off as a community of engineers.